Officials Weighing Alternatives : Tax District Favored to Add Inglewood Police

Inglewood City Council members appear to favor an assessment district that would cost homeowners about $60 a year to pay for more police officers.

The city staff this week presented the council with three options to achieve their goal of enlarging the 187-officer police force:

Ask voters in the June 7 primary to approve a special parcel tax, which would cost about $60 per home and $120 per business, to raise the $1.4 million a year needed to pay for 20 new officers, including fringe benefits and equipment. The tax would require a two-thirds majority vote.

Create a citywide “police benefit assessment district” that would impose about the same rates as the special tax and provide 20 officers. California law permits cities to set up districts to finance specified services. An election would not be required, but the city would have to notify owners of its plans and provide a protest period and public hearing.

Direct city staff to work with existing revenue to provide a smaller increase in police staffing. That decision would be in line with recommendations presented last week in a consultant’s report, which suggested hiring five new officers and 11 civilians.

The council will consider the options on Tuesday, but council members and several other community leaders said they favored the assessment district as the best way to ensure funding for new officers. They said comments from constituents indicate that residents want more police and are willing to pay for them.

Both of the other options have greater political and practical drawbacks than the assessment district, council members said. Special taxes requiring a two-thirds majority vote have a history of failure in California, according to a city staff report. The deadline for placing such an item on the June 7 ballot would be Tuesday.

“If we have an election, we might have 65% of the people say yes and the proposal will still lose because we need 67%,” said Councilman Anthony Scardenzan. “It’s a gamble. We might make a lot of people unhappy.”

Scardenzan, who has been pushing for 20 new officers for more than a year, said he now favors an assessment district over his original proposal of a ballot initiative.

Overwhelming Support

At a meeting of Mayor Edward Vincent’s newly formed anti-crime task force last week, a group of business and community leaders discussed police manpower and concluded that they overwhelmingly support an assessment district. The group includes Chamber of Commerce President Jack Moyer, Juvenile Court Judge Roosevelt Dorn and Inglewood School Supt. Rex Fortune.

Vincent said the advantage of the assessment district proposal, as contrasted with the initiative, is that the council would have time to hear the opinions of residents and business owners through the legally mandated public response process.

The mayor also said the city is moving in the same direction as other cities in Los Angeles County that are reacting to gang and drug problems.

“Most municipalities are beefing up their police forces,” Vincent said, citing increases by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and Los Angeles police. “We don’t want the criminals to spill over into our area.”

With either an assessment district or a parcel tax, more officers could be on the street soon after the 1988-89 budget is approved in July, Assistant City Manager Norman Cravens said. The department hires from a pool of applicants and hires many officers from other departments, Cravens said.

To some extent, deciding to hire 20 more officers would ignore the advice in a $65,000 report presented to the city by Public Administration Services, a Virginia-based consultant’s firm. The report recommends putting more patrol officers on the street by streamlining administrative positions and specialized units and hiring more civilians to free officers for street duty.

The cost of implementing the recommendations, including hiring five new officers, would be $905,448, city officials said.

However, there is considerable discontent in the department with some of the consultant’s methods and findings. In particular, police officers have disagreed with the recommendation that the department would be more effective if it disbanded specialized tactical units, such as the gang unit, and reintegrated their officers into the investigative and patrol bureaus.

Council members and city officials acknowledge that some of the report’s directives are experimental, will take time to review and, in some cases, may never be implemented.

They appear to be in favor of working to hire more officers while the city analyzes the study and decides what changes should be made.

“Some of the recommendations we’ll use and some we won’t,” Vincent told the meeting. “We know we need more police and more police in patrol.”

Scardenzan said hiring new officers “on top of the corrections recommended by the report” ultimately could result in a gain of more than 20 officers.