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Report defuses feuds over sheriff's budget
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 26, 2001 A just-released consultant's report should do what nobody else has accomplished over the past quarter of a century: remove politics from the question of law enforcement spending in Pasco County. The $125,000 report from DMG-Maximus shows that the Pasco Sheriff's Office has an adequate staff now, and should without massive additions through 2010. The findings will be hard to refute because they come from an impartial third party. The report should end the near-annual bickering between sheriffs and county commissioners over the size of the sheriff's budget. The information also should benefit county planners who are considering adding law enforcement as a required element to the county's comprehensive land-use plan. The report details what positions should be needed by the end of the decade. The call for the study came in January 2000, just two days after the St. Petersburg Times reported that Sheriff Lee Cannon's administration did not know how long it took deputies to respond to emergencies, how long it took to send backup to deputies, how much time officers spent answering calls, or even how many calls for service the office received. With minimal staffing additions, better training and a reallocation of personnel, the agency could reach its stated goals for response time and patrolling, the newspaper found. Sixteen months earlier, Cannon had asked voters for an $80-million, 10-year property tax to hire 220 deputies and 50 civilians to boost what he called the dangerously understaffed agency. Voters rejected the referendum by nearly a 4-1 margin. The study from DMG-Maximus debunks the former sheriff's claims. But Cannon, who lost his re-election bid in November to Bob White, was not alone in his thinking. Contentions that Pasco's top law enforcement agency is understaffed stretch back at least to the John Short administration, which began in 1976. The 208-page document is more than a wholesale repudiation of those long-held beliefs. It is a guide to a more efficient Sheriff's Office, including recommendations for changes in chain of command, training and deployment. The recommendations include: Disbanding the five-deputy agricultural unit created by Cannon. "The east side deputies clearly have the time to handle the workload," the report states. Eliminating a civilian pilot, one of three pilots in the aviation unit. Dissolving the marine patrol if productivity cannot improve substantially. Transferring a half-dozen detectives from property crimes to crimes against children. (The report makes no recommendation on the domestic violence unit, recently targeted by White for merging with a newly created major crimes unit.) Reassigning some detectives in the intelligence unit -- charged with developing information to help dismantle organized criminal enterprises -- to vice. The workload of the four intelligence detectives dropped each year since 1998, the study said. The agency's move to put personal computers into patrol cars will allow deputies to write reports from the field and eliminate call-in specialists who now take those reports over the telephone. The annual savings will be $735,000. By 2010, the report recommends that the agency's payroll, excluding the jail, should climb from 665 to 719. New positions would include seven dispatchers, seven deputies, four child protective team investigators, and two school resource officers. The study was a long time in coming, prompted only by Cannon's embarrassment over the disclosed fallacies of his failed tax campaign. But more important than lingering political implications is the report's long shelf life. Caustic arguments over money between the sheriff and county staffers need to be a thing of the past.
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