Public safety is the most basic of municipal services and San Diegans are worried. In the latest San Diego Institute/Competitive Edge Research and Communication Barometer, 15.3% of city residents mentioned “crime and public safety” or “police pay” as the local issues that concerned them the most. Outside of the City, such concerns were even more pronounced, with 19.6% of residents in the rest of the county ranking public safety as their top issue.
Disconcerting trends at the national level are, in part, giving rise to these anxieties. MSNBC reported last week that forty out of 56 large police departments around the nation have seen a marked rise in the number of homicides over the past two years. That translates into an overall 10.2% increase in the number of murders. Locally, there have been a number of high profile shootings and violent incidents that should give pause to City officials and serve as a grim reminder that public safety is municipal government’s most important job.
San Diego, fortunately, has historically done a good job in addressing public safety problems. It has one of the lowest crime rates of any large US city and has been a leader in innovative programs such as community policing, youth intervention, and support for victims of domestic violence.
The disturbing reality, however, is that this track record of success is under threat. As has been pointed out in recent weeks, San Diego is facing a critical problem in retaining its most highly skilled and best trained officers. Some of the City’s challenges stems from demographic changes in the nation’s labor pool. But exacerbating this dilemma in San Diego is a very problematic compensation system. Recruitment is becoming increasingly difficult and several dozen police officers have left the City’s employment to work elsewhere.
Most employers faced with this problem would raise pay. But as readers of this paper know all too well, the failures of the past - paying pensions based upon the single highest year of pay (rather than an average of the top three), the DROP program, under priced service credits and pension under funding have created a billion dollar deficit. San Diego is truly caught between a rock and a hard place.
Any solution to this problem will be based upon three core principles. First, the City must act like a smart and intelligent employer. One can already hear the chorus of insiders pointing to this salary survey or that benchmark which they claim shows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that some group of employees is “underpaid”. The City must resist such calls and focus on the fact that the best gauge of whether compensation levels need to be adjusted is whether it is difficult to retain and recruit a particular kind of employee.
Second, the FY 2007 budget must make certain hard choices and eliminate the “nice-to-have” programs in the City’s budget. Failure to make hard choices and end certain subsidies will only make the problem harder to solve. It is incumbent that the Mayor presents, the Independent Budget Analyst examines, and the Council enacts a budget that reduces subsidies to outside groups and which makes difficult choices. At a time when police officers are leaving, the City can ill afford to offer grants to street festivals. It is also long over due for the City to examine whether CCDC should shoulder more of the debt and, where permissible under state law, operating expenses for the Convention Center and Pecto Park. While such policies might anger downtown special interests, such a shift would not only free up several million dollars for the general fund, it also make sense given the close nexus between these projects and downtown’s success.
Third, the City must address its flawed healthcare system. The City currently offers its employees close to a dozen different plans and its flexible benefit plan has a relatively rare attribute that allows employees who do not need to use all of the City’s contribution to take a cash payout. The currently system provides strong incentives for employees to seek healthcare outside of the city and, in turn, this tends to make the City’s risk profile unattractive to insurers. The City is caught in a vicious cycle of rising premiums and even greater incentives for employees to find ways of opting out. By moving all employees to one or two health plans and ending the cash payout aspect of the cafeteria plan, San Diego should be able to realize major savings and efficiencies which could be reinvested into public safety programs..
Ultimately the city will face hard choices in the FY 2007 budget. The public needs to brace itself for what should be a bruising budget fight. If the Mayor and Council choose to make these decisions, they can begin to address the issues the public cares deeply about – such as public safety and police retention. If they fail to confront hard choices, the public is likely to be bitterly disappointed.
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