Proposed Coeur d’Alene budget would add 15 police, firefighters

Fifteen more police officers and firefighters would be hired in Coeur d’Alene under the city’s proposed budget for next fiscal year.

The public safety boost will help police respond to more calls for service and allow the city to staff a new fire station on the northwest side of town.

The city also has cut four positions in its legal department. Officials say a decline in misdemeanor citations has decreased the caseload, justifying the downsizing of the criminal division.

A city crime analysis shows the number of serious offenses, arrests, citations and police reports have gone down in the past two years, while calls for service are up. The police department, with 77 officers, handled 20,437 calls in the first six months of this year – a 3 percent increase over the same period in 2013.

“Coeur d’Alene has a couple of challenges,” City Administrator Jim Hammond said in explaining the need for more officers. “One is the influx of summer visitors. Secondly, when you’re so close to a major city like Spokane, you probably need to beef up your policing, more so than if you’re an isolated city.”

Police also are responding to more reports of loitering, property crimes and drug use associated with homeless people, Hammond said. “It’s that kind of concern that we’re hearing from our citizens that we want to correct.”

Police Chief Lee White, who was hired a year ago, champions a policing philosophy that emphasizes warnings and public education. In the first half of this year, Coeur d’Alene officers wrote 2,272 citations – about 900 fewer than two years ago.

“We are writing fewer tickets but we are having an impact with our visibility and education,” said Sgt. Christie Wood, police spokeswoman. “We want our officers to focus as much on the education piece as they do the enforcement.”

In the $86 million budget proposed for 2015-16, the city eliminated a contracted assistant city attorney and three legal assistants in the criminal division. Those employees were told in June they’ll be laid off effective Sept. 30.

“As we looked at what we were spending for our legal costs for a city our size, they were substantially larger than other comparable cities,” Hammond said.

The city mulled outsourcing the criminal division to Kootenai County, which said it could do the job for about $316,000 less than the city spends now. Instead, city officials decided to cut that much from the legal budget and continue to provide misdemeanor prosecutions in-house.

Hammond said he doesn’t think the additional officers will lead to a heavier workload for city attorneys.

“If you’re working with people to prevent crime of the sort that would create a citation, actually you’re not writing more citations, you’re writing less,” he said.

The criminal division, which leases space downtown, also will be brought into City Hall, where the legal department’s civil division is housed.

The city also has talked about trimming the legal department’s civil division. Its workload has decreased since the city last year turned to the member-owned Idaho Counties Risk Management Program to handle liability, property and casualty claims.

“We’re fully insured so we should be able to lessen the workload in the legal department because we’re not handling those cases anymore,” said Troy Tymesen, the city’s finance director.

The city plans to hire nine more firefighters late next summer for the fire station to be built on North Atlas Road just north of West Hanley Avenue. The fire department aims to open the new station by Oct. 1, 2016.

City voters in May approved a public safety bond measure that included $600,000 for a new firetruck for that station. Construction will be funded from city development impact fees.

The City Council will meet Tuesday to review the budget proposal and set the maximum it will spend next year. A public hearing on the budget will be held Sept. 1 in the community meeting room at the Coeur d’Alene Library. Both meetings will start at 6 p.m.