SEQUIM — Police Chief Robert Spinks found himself taken to task Monday night during a long discussion of Sequim’s finances going into 2010.
“One thing that’s conspicuously missing” from the discussion, began City Council member Erik Erichsen, “is soul-searching in the Police Department.”
The council had just heard a list of possible cuts in city services, from the annual $25,000 for downtown flower baskets to reductions in city office hours and staff.
Spinks did not hesitate when responding to Erichsen.
The Police Department has already cut staff, he said: two full-time officer positions stayed vacant this year, and his executive assistant went from full-time to half-time.
“That’s more than any other [city] department, period,” the chief said.
Council member Ken Hays questioned the police budget, too, wondering aloud whether Sequim has more police than is warranted for a city this size.
With 19 officers and 5,715 residents according to state population figures, Sequim has more police than many small towns: roughly one officer for every 300 people.
‘Invade Carlsborg’
Hays, contending that the typical ratio for Sequim-size cities is one to two officers per 1,000, suggested that Spinks’ department borders on supersized.
“It feels like we’ve got a force big enough to invade Carlsborg,” Hays joked.
“We’ve used three national benchmarks to compare ourselves,” Spinks said. Based on those, “we’re understaffed.”
The Sequim Police Department’s work load has swelled 90 percent over the past five years, the chief added, noting that last year his force dealt with more than 14,361 “incidents.”
That makes Sequim’s police as busy as they would be in a city of 15,000 to 18,000, Spinks said.
“If you want to talk about cutting police officers,” he added, “we pulled the school resource officer back [to patrol] to fix the hole of cutting $100,000 from the budget” in 2009.
Detective Cory Hall was also reassigned to patrol, leaving the force with one detective, one detective sergeant and another detective assigned to the Olympic Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Team, or OPNET.
“We basically have 12 cops for patrol. That guarantees us two police officers 24 hours a day,” Spinks said. Cutting that back “affects the safety and security of my own staff.”
Sequim isn’t the sleepy little spot it used to be, Spinks often says.
Ugly at night
“It gets kind of ugly around here,” he told the council, “after night falls.”
Hays wasn’t having it. He told Spinks he travels the city most days and nights and doesn’t feel it’s all that dangerous.
Spinks said that the leap upward in work load for Sequim’s officers isn’t due only to the population growth of the past few years.
“It’s because we’re a retail center,” he said, that draws shoppers — and criminals – from outside.
But Mayor Laura Dubois questioned Spinks’ semantics.
Calls for service
“I really want to see dispatched calls for service,” not just “work load” numbers, she said.
The Sequim Police’s 2008 annual report breaks down the 14,361 issues handled by officers to 6,102 dispatched calls, 6,396 incidents that generated police reports and 7,965 “quick calls” such as traffic stops and reports of loud noises.
Hays, for his part, emphasized that he considers Sequim’s police “first class,” and is merely wanting to build a sustainable budget for the city.
The Police Department’s budget went from $2.251 million in 2007 to $2.509 million in 2008.
“Yeah, we did build up,” and add staff during Sequim’s boom years of 2006 and 2007, Spinks acknowledged.
This year is another story. In 2009 the police budget dipped to $2.416 million. Equipment spending and out-of-town training have been cut back and, Spinks reminded Hays, “Nobody else has lost real bodies. We have.”
Finally, council member Walt Schubert admonished Hays to ride along with a Sequim officer during an evening shift, and then see where he would trim department spending.
Spinks described the exchange as “a healthy discussion.”
“We want to educate the council as to what we’re doing out there,” he said.
“There are nights when it’s pretty quiet, and some nights when the officers are run ragged.”
The exchange between Spinks and the council constituted just one round of talks about the city’s financial trouble. Interim city manager Linda Herzog outlined ways to raise revenue that include a utility tax increase — from 6 percent to 10 percent for water and sewer and from 6 percent to 8 percent for garbage pickup — that aroused no enthusiasm.
“I am absolutely against raising taxes,” Schubert declared.
Herzog warned the council members one last time Monday night that the gap between revenues and expenditures going into 2010 could be as much as $850,000.
Then on Wednesday, Herzog worked her last day as Sequim’s interim manager.
She completed her nine-month contract right after the council voted Tuesday night to hire Vernon Stoner, a 30-year veteran of city and state agency management, to run Sequim.
The council has appointed City Attorney Craig Ritchie interim manager until Stoner starts in early October.
Budget-development season will begin in earnest soon after Stoner arrives.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
