Hawthorne to Appoint Citizens Panel to Study Police, Fire Funding

Frustrated by the third defeat in two years of a tax measure to raise money for additional police, the Hawthorne City Council this week voted to create a blue-ribbon citizens panel to study alternative funding methods for its Police and Fire departments.

The 10-member committee, which will include prominent citizens and business leaders, will study staffing levels in every city department and recommend possible cuts to raise money for police and fire services over the next 20 years. The report is due in June.

“I’m hoping that each council member will pick two people who are above and beyond reproach so that their level of credibility can be widely accepted by everybody,” Councilman David York, who proposed the panel, said in an interview Wednesday.

The members are scheduled to be named at the council’s Thursday meeting.

The committee’s final report “will either verify or it will nullify reports from staff that the city is being run as efficiently and cost effectively as it possibly can be (and) that it has eliminated all levels of fat and unnecessary spending,” York said.

Charges that the Police Department is not managing its resources well were partly responsible for the November defeat of Proposition D, a tax measure that would have raised $2.5 million a year to pay for 35 additional police officers.

The measure, which proposed imposing a $55-a-year tax on residential units and up to $5,000 on commercial properties, received the approval of 53% of the city’s voters, far short of the two-thirds needed.

In June, a similar measure failed by just 58 votes, prompting the council to place a revised measure on the November ballot. In 1988, voters overwhelmingly rejected a measure that would have increased utility taxes from 3.5% to 6% to raise money for more police.

Supporters of the recent tax proposal compiled statistics showing that the city’s rising crime rate has outpaced growth in the Police Department, giving Hawthorne one of the highest ratios of crimes per resident in the South Bay and one of the lowest ratios of officers per resident in the area.

But opponents of the measure accused the department of having too few sworn officers. The department, which has a budget of about $10.5 million a year, employs about 90 sworn officers and more than 100 other part-time and full-time workers.

Opponents also said the city could save about $7 million a year by dismantling its own Police Department and contracting with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, a point several city officials dispute.

The issue has divided the council for several years. Sparks have flown during council meetings over whether the city should even commission surveys to look into the costs of contracting with the county for police and fire protection.

Mayor Betty Ainsworth and Councilmen David York and Chuck Bookhammer oppose the county surveys, which would cost about $4,000 apiece, because they say the county would provide less service than the city’s own departments provide.

The county Sheriff’s Department, for instance, often assigns a single patrol car to cover the same amount of area that Hawthorne Police cover with four patrol cars, said York, a retired Hawthorne Police Department lieutenant.

“The level of services that our city’s citizens are receiving are in fact much greater than what the county can provide,” York said. Because the Sheriff’s Department pays its officers more and has better benefit packages, “for them to provide the same amount of services, person-to-person, equipment-to-equipment, it’s going to have to cost a lot more money.”

York also said he believes the morale of the city’s police and fire employees would suffer if the city commissioned the surveys.

But council members Steve Andersen and Ginny Lambert disagree that the surveys would hurt morale, and they say the city’s budgetary woes warrant a comparative study of costs. They also say contracting with the county would reduce the city’s liability for police actions, which might result in substantial savings. Earlier this year, the city agreed to pay $1.95 million to settle a police brutality lawsuit filed by the Vagos motorcycle club.

Other savings might be gained, they say, simply because the Sheriff’s Department tends to have a leaner administration than Hawthorne police.

Despite their disagreements, council members on both sides of the issue say that if county surveys are commissioned, they should evaluate the costs of providing services comparable to those currently provided by the city.

Capt. Bill Mangan of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said his office tries to make cost evaluation surveys compatible with those services a community is already receiving so that the council “can easily make a comparison.”

But James Hunt, deputy chief of the county Fire Department, said apples-to-apples evaluations aren’t possible in his department because the city’s staffing levels and facilities may not suit the needs of the county, which has fire stations in neighboring areas.

In both instances, however, the county would make an effort to hire every qualified Hawthorne firefighter and police officer, should the city decide to contract with the county for those services.

“It would not be an attractive proposal for a city (if) we did not attempt to find suitable employment for their employees,” Mangan said.

Last month, members of the Hawthorne Firemen’s Assn., who long have complained about low pay and high workloads, voted 59 to 4, with one abstention, in favor of getting a cost survey from the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

The Hawthorne Police Officers Assn., however, has not considered the issue and has no plans to do so in the near future, association President Larry Boe said.

At the council meeting Monday night, Lambert said she wanted guarantees that the panel should have information from county surveys available to them. “Without that, we’re sending (panelists) on a fruitless mission,” she said. “They need to have that information.”

But York, Bookhammer and Ainsworth, who said they wanted to leave the issue to the panel’s discretion, prevailed. The council finally approved the panel’s creation 4 to 0, with Lambert saying she was casting her vote under protest. Andersen was absent.

In an interview Wednesday, York said that although he believes the county surveys would be a waste of money and time, “if the committee comes back and says, ‘We’d like to have a county survey,’ by all means, we’ll come back and do that.”