I love the U.S.A. deeply – warts and all – and I always considered my military service as public service. Several times during my career the Department of Defense initiated a RIF, which stands for Reduction In Force, and that meant lots of pink slips. During those times, I was convinced that the nation needed officers exactly like me more than just about any other soldier. Of course, I was in the impossible position of trying to balance the public interest of reducing the armed forces with my personal interest of keeping my career and job.
Why should I expect anything different from the members of the Hollister Police Department and their families? They came to the city council meeting with a year-old report that said the only way to save money under consolidation was to eliminate several police positions. That threat becomes very personal, very fast, but it is certainly not gospel.
Common sense rejects the “us versus them” attitude. The residents of Hollister must travel through the county to go almost anywhere. Do we want to wait until those driving under the influence or racing get to the city line before there is enough police coverage to stop them? If someone is manufacturing, cultivating, or transporting illegal drugs in the county, those drugs will end up in the city where most of the population resides. Some county residents also pointed out that they spend a lot of money in the city, which supports city public services with sales taxes.
Interest conflicts aside, there is a real problem; neither the county nor the city has adequate financial resources to provide the level of policing we need under the current organizational structures. Hollister has implemented a temporary 1 percent sales tax to help its overall financial condition; the county has yet to do the same for the unincorporated areas, and even if it did, it would not solve the problem completely.
I have written extensively about the excessive cost of keeping a member of the HPD on the job. This is primarily due to bad fiscal decisions made by previous city administrations that shoveled out the promises and benefits, but did not pay for them. They left the big bills behind; it’s split milk, so just blame yourself for electing them.
We can make some dents in the basic cost structure, but realistically they do not amount to much. Forever pay freezes and furloughs are not solutions, they are just placeholders; the savings are not sustainable and there is a lot of downside. Besides, they just run up expensive overtime.
The only viable answer it to work together to reduce the overhead, overtime, and peripheral operating costs so we can get more primary services for the budgets we can afford. This may take the shape of sharing, contracting, trading, some functional consolidation, or all of those, but it must be done. While the original consolidation report scared everyone, it did not scare them enough to implement even the minimum recommended actions – inertia rules!
The San Benito County Sheriff’s Office and Hollister Police Department are on the front lines – they are the local experts. They can work together to find acceptable solutions or they can have the financial pressures force solutions upon them. Their relationship must go beyond professional respect and support; they have to find a way to provide more and better service and that means getting creative and putting some level of self-interest aside for the sake of the public.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident.
