Wilmington’s City Council Looks to Wash Its Hands of the City’s Safety Problem and Just Throw Money At It

Timed for the Friday afternoon news dump, Wilmington’s City Council has scheduled a joint Committee of the Whole and a Public Safety meeting to debate the City budget’s first budget amendment (not a month after the new budget went into effect). This budget amendment will add funds to the WPD budget to create two new Inspector positions and one civilian CIO position. The meeting is this Monday (June 29, 2015) at the City Council chambers starting at 5pm. This amendment has been revised from the original ask, now it provides approval for 3 new positions (rather than 4), does not add to the authorized strength of the Department and now spends just $285,000 of a projected surplus. A projected surplus that no one has any confidence in and AGAIN, I do not understand why we are committing to spending money that we think that we might have, rather than money that we actually do have. I’ll extend that to wonder why they are having this hearing at all right now — given that the GA has blown a hole in their budget and no one know what the world will look like on July 1, it seems clueless to spend any time talking about more spending until you know that your budget is intact.

But this entire business has the feel of being railroaded through. Finalizing an agenda and announcing it on the Friday afternoon before your Monday meeting; little to no promotion of this meeting by Council Members; and the astonishing level of effort to spin this up as actually addressing Wilmington’s safety problem, when in fact, it is an effort to get this thing off of their plates as fast as possible. This budget amendment belongs in the Finance Committee. But Council President Gregory sent it to the Public Safety Committee where his pal Mike Brown will make sure it gets perfunctory attention and passed back to the Council for a vote. A vote that is already in the bag, it looks like. A vote that isn’t about either fiscal responsibility OR better safety for the City. These people are writing their campaign literature for 2016 and they are looking to get this really tough problem off of their plates. Most of them hear an earful about supporting the WPSSC’s recommendations and the Administration gave them just what they wanted — and easy out. Because doing the work to actually represent the people who pay for the resources that are not adequately addressing their safety is going to get in the way of their Facebook updates.

If you are a Wilmington resident, please reach out to your Councilperson to ask them to NOT support this budget amendment. The WPD has a budget that can accommodate these positions — they’ve said that they’ve done the work to get better efficiencies and those efficiencies should fund their new positions. At least, ask that Councilperson why they are talking about spending money they do not have in the shadow of having a bunch of state money withdrawn from their budget. Seriously, this part is just fiscal malpractice. Also ask them why they aren’t looking into the claims that the WPD has made about accomplishing many of the recommendations of the WPSSC. Because their claims are still vaporware.

And come to the City Council chamber on Monday and bring your neighbors. If they are going to railroad this thing through, there might as well be witnesses.