How does Sacramento’s police budget jump as staff shrinks? Follow the money | Opinion

Tom Philp
·4 min read
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Here’s a Sacramento city budget puzzle: How can the police budget for the coming fiscal year grow by a stunning 13 percent while the staff itself shrinks by 1 percent?

The answer goes back to a fateful December night in Sacramento City Hall. This is when the Sacramento City Council unanimously approved two years’ worth of staff raises. These were the raises that City Manager Howard Chan a month later, would describe as “unsustainable” and that “we can not afford.”

Two-thirds of Sacramento’s $66 million budget gap entering the coming fiscal year can be attributed to these raises exceeding 10 percent, some $45 million in new costs. Had Chan and the council been less generous on the raises to something more in line with projected inflation, the city could be having an entirely different discussion right now about what investment trade-offs are truly possible.

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Instead, the city went on a $45 million spending spree in December. To cover that cost, the city is proposing to squeeze everyday Sacramentans with just about every city fee imaginable, from parking downtown to charges to senior special events.

For city voters who have increased the local sales tax by a full cent over the years, the result has not eased Sacramento’s structural budget problems. As an illustration of just how bad the underbelly of city finances are, consider this: City government would have to do the impossible and shut down for nearly two years - no police, no firefighters, no parks staff, no spending whatsoever - to pay off the city’s unfunded retirement and capital costs.

The city’s $1.6 billion spending plan estimates the unfunded liability for retirement benefits (pension and health) at ironically the very same number, $1.6 billion. Unfunded capital projects to maintain the city’s aging infrastructure add another $1.4 billion to what’s someday needed to keep these backbone investments intact.

Big salary increases have a compounding impact on the budget. Higher salaries mean higher pensions. Unless the employees pay for the bigger pensions through their bigger contributions, the city is left holding the bag.

Credit Chan for taking some necessary steps. The budget, for example, proposes to eliminate 44 positions that are currently vacant, including some from the police department. It avoids layoffs.

But the city is setting the stage to raise just about every fee even higher. There is only so much revenue to squeeze out of everyday citizens before this strategy is against the public interest. Just because the city can legally pile on more fees does not mean it’s the right thing for the City Council to do.

At this stage, there is not much that Mayor Darrell Steinberg or the City Council can do other than to tinker around the budget’s edges. Some version of this will need to pass. But this budget cycle hopefully is sending three important messages to the two candidates running for mayor, Flojaune Cofer and Kevin McCarty.

First, the mayor and council need greater direct control of financial strategies. The council should take full advantage of the independent City Auditor. This office should analyze the impact of future collective bargaining proposals on the budget. If pay raises are declared unsustainable in January, they had to have been unsustainable in December when they were approved. But that conversation didn’t happen last December. The fiscal implications of salary decisions cannot be avoided at decision time. Chan is not offering a long-term path to reducing the city’s crushing unfunded liabilities. Perhaps the auditor or outside consulting experts can.

Two, the city needs to rethink public safety. When the Police Department budget increases and the staff decreases, that is a signal that something is wrong. There must be a smarter and more cost-effective way to provide the staff and services to respond to calls for public safety services.

Three, the city needs to find cost-effective ways to open new “Safe Ground” managed encampments for homeless people rather than letting this population suffer on the street without safe places to sleep at night. It falls to local governments to find these local solutions.

The cities in California that can innovate and evolve with the times are going to be the ones that succeed and thrive, one smart budget at a time. It’s possible here in Sacramento. It will take a new way of reimagining how to wisely spend the public’s money.