City Police, Urban Planning Get Top Billing in San Diego Budget

Putting more police officers on the streets and taking a firmer grip on urban growth emerged as the dominant themes Thursday in the City of San Diego’s $644-million budget for 1987.

Council members, wrapping up weeks of tedious budget hearings, approved a budget that will go into effect July 1 and add millions of dollars to the city’s police and planning departments.

The budget will add 99 police officers by next summer, including larger teams to help curb street gang violence and drug traffic.

The extra officers, which increased the Police Department’s budget from $91.2 million to more than $100 million next year, will more than keep pace with the city’s growing population.

But the additions fall short of the council’s publicly stated goal of achieving a ratio of two police officers per 1,000 San Diegans within five years. Council members agreed on the standard in the belief that it would enhance officer safety and help cut crime.

Meanwhile, council members also ratified a series of changes designed to transform their overworked, cramped planning department into a more powerful instrument to shape growth and enforce zoning codes.

The changes include new computers, more office space and additional community planners, including a training officer who will help tutor community groups on the intricacies of land-use planning.

“Thank Heaven, planning did make it,” Councilwoman Judy McCarty said Thursday about that changes that will raise the department’s budget from $5.1 million to $7.1 million. She said the changes were crucial because “the people have lost faith in the City Council being able to deal with growth in this city.”

“If we would have missed this opportunity to make this start, it would have been criminal,” she said.

The council’s largess Thursday even extended to the California Public Interest Research Group (CalPIRG), the consumer advocacy group that seemed all but destined to lose its funding. But council members gave it a $200 increase by approving $40,799--an appropriation that Councilman Mike Gotch credited to the group’s tireless lobbying campaign.

“You wrote. You called. You participated. You came down here. You made a difference,” Gotch told several rows of CalPIRG partisans seated in the council chamber.

There were some losers in the budget, however. Mayor-elect Maureen O’Connor’s $500,000 request for after-school activities through the park and recreation department was cut, a move publicly bemoaned by McCarty.

And City Atty. John Witt didn’t receive the $98,000 senior chief deputy he requested, although the council did give him almost 17 new positions for civil and criminal lawyers, as well as added zoning code enforcement.

Going into Thursday, it appeared that more would have to go, because City Manager Sylvester Murray’s staff told council members they would only have only about $616 million to spend.

But that number grew overnight, as Murray’s staff was instructed Wednesday to work late and compile a list of everything the council wanted to increase in funding. The extra spending money came, in part, from monies made available by a settlement earlier this year of a lawsuit by San Diego Gas & Electric; “carry-over” from city construction projects and federal grants; additional park fees, and revenue revisions.

When the list was delivered to the council floor Thursday morning, aides huddled in doorways to compare notes as political horse-trading became more intense.

From the beginning of the budget talks, it was clear the council’s top priorities were public safety and planning.

The council members agreed from the outset that they wanted to fulfill the pledge of providing two police officers per 1,000 residents within five years. Attaining that goal would have meant adding 142 officers. The council early on settled on 89--31 just to keep up with the current ratio because of growth, and 58 as genuine strengthening of the force.

It decided Thursday to add even more. At the urging of Councilman Uvaldo Martinez, the council added another position for a sworn officer for a “storefront” office in the Gaslamp Quarter adjacent Horton Plaza.

At the urgings of Councilman William Jones, the council also agreed to fund in January--or mid-year in the budget cycle--four officers each for the street gang and narcotics details. The addition of one sergeant’s position brought the department’s increase to 99 officers by next year.

Even environmentalists came away from Thursday’s final budget session happy. Although the council whittled away at the $4.5 million that was freed by the legal settlement of an SDG&E; lawsuit and was set aside for wetlands preservation, it did leave $2.9 million for that cause.

“I think it is a tremendous commitment that they made,” said Jay Powell, conservation coordinator for the local Sierra Club chapter. “It’s really a catalyst for us to solve problems with the wetlands area.”