Agencies Ready Bids for Crime Bill Money : Law enforcement: Ventura County sheriff and police fear they may be overshadowed by urban areas.

Police departments in Oxnard, Ventura and Santa Paula are scrambling to retool old federal grant applications so they can get in line for a share of President Clinton’s $30-billion anti-crime package.

Ventura County Sheriff Larry Carpenter is also studying how to grab a portion of the huge pot of money that federal officials promise will boost police staffing 18% to 20% nationwide by the year 2000.

The $13.45-billion Cops on the Beat program aims to make good on Clinton’s campaign promise of putting 100,000 more officers on the street--which Ventura County police chiefs hope could replace officers bled away by the county’s faltering economy.

But Carpenter and local police chiefs worry there will be little left for them once Cops on the Beat hires new officers to fight the horrendous crime in the nation’s larger cities.

“My concern is that urban areas with high crime rates are probably going to get the lion’s share of this money,” said Carpenter, whose agency polices half the county’s 10 cities and all of the unincorporated areas.

Oxnard Police Chief Harold Hurtt is also concerned about the competitive disadvantage of local police agencies. “We’re probably going to be punished because of our low crime rate in the county,” Hurtt said. “There’s an awful lot of agencies around the country that are in worse shape than we are.”

But U. S. Justice Department officials brushed these doubts aside.

Police agencies of all sizes will have an even shot at the money, said Caroline Adelman, a Justice Department spokeswoman. She said the grants will be doled out according to a variety of factors, including high crime rates and a need for community-based police patrols to prevent crime.

“I don’t think anyone has a plan that this much money’s going to the Northeast and this much to the Southwest,” she said. “We’re very aware that when you pop a whole bunch of police into one area, crime can spread into correlating areas. . . . I don’t think that because Los Angeles gets a whole bunch none of the surrounding areas will.”

Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), who met last week with officials from all the county’s police agencies, said: “(The) Justice (Department) has assured me that this is going to be a fair shake. It’s not all going to go to the urban areas like Los Angeles and Detroit and New York City.”

And Gallegly pointed out that with a faltering economy and persistent gang problems, Ventura County also needs the kind of crime-prevention programs the crime bill offers in addition to Cops on the Beat.

Last year, the Justice Department offered a similar program to help police departments hire more officers. But the program only promised to pay for half of the costs of equipping, training and paying the officers.

This time around, Adelman said, the Justice Department will start by kicking in 75% of the cost of new officers, with local agencies paying the rest. The federal share shrinks year by year until 2000, when the police departments must find state or local funding to cover the salaries and other costs of new officers.

In addition, departments that lost bids for last year’s grants will be considered first this time, she said.

Among the first in line will be Ventura County’s largest city police force and one of its smallest--Oxnard and Santa Paula.

With barely one officer per 1,000 residents, the Oxnard force is one of the nation’s leanest and busiest for cities of its size, Chief Hurtt said. He is not pleased that the force’s average response to emergencies has slowed in recent years.

“It reduces our flexibility to respond to problem areas,” Hurtt said, “like areas with high rates of burglaries or areas where drugs are being sold on the street. We don’t have a ready pool of people that we can assign to that for a long-term basis.”

Last fall, Oxnard applied for a $1-million slice of the $150-million federal allotment for new officers, hoping to boost its 164-member force by another 16 officers, Assistant Chief Tom Cady said. The bid was turned down, he said.

This time, while asking for extra officers, the department also will seek money to support anti-crime programs such as the Police Activities League, the Boys & Girls Clubs and a midnight sports league touted in the Clinton crime bill as a way to keep youths off the street and out of trouble, Cady said.

An influx of new officers would free community-policing supervisors to work full time with neighborhood leaders, Hurtt said. Also, he said, crime-prevention grants would give police a head start with youths at risk of becoming criminals, Hurtt said.

“We have to realize we need to start extending programs to prevent people from committing serious crimes, and we need to do that through education,” he said.

Santa Paula police say they face an even tougher situation, given that the city’s police force has dropped to 29 officers, the level it was at 22 years ago. In that same time period, the city’s population has swelled from 19,000 to 27,000.

Now, police lock the dispatchers inside the station house after hours because officers cannot be spared to staff the front desk, said Chief Walt Adair.

The department has put off maintenance on the building. The D.A.R.E. program was shut down in the first half of the year. And with officers spending most of their time handling crimes against people, there is no time to follow up on smaller crimes such as minor burglaries, Adair said.

Last fall, Santa Paula police applied for a $287,000 federal grant under the U. S. Attorney General’s Police Officer Hiring Program, promising to match it with $287,000 in city money to hire three new officers. The bid was rejected.

“We’re providing basic law enforcement services,” Adair said last week. “An 18% to 20% increase in the department would make a world of difference in what we can do.”

In Ventura, the city’s 117-officer Police Department also sought federal aid last fall.

Ventura police asked for nearly $1 million to extend the tenure of nine officers who were about to be laid off due to city cutbacks, said Robbie Robinson, administrative assistant to the city’s police and fire chiefs.

Eventually, the City Council restored six of the positions and extended the other three until next July in hopes that the department could come up with the funding, he said.

Robinson said he will apply for federal aid to retain the remaining three positions.

Last year, the Sheriff’s Department was the only Ventura County law enforcement agency to win any of the grant money.

The Justice Department awarded the sheriff $300,000--which the county met with matching funds and augmented with money for new equipment and supplies--to open a storefront police station in Fillmore, said Chief Deputy Kenneth Kipp.

But Kipp and Sheriff Carpenter scoffed at promises that the crime bill would increase their ranks by 18% to 20%.

“We’ve got 700 sworn officers in this department,” Carpenter said, working the math. “That’s 140 deputies somebody’s got to write a check for. Does that make sense? That’s huge .”

Kipp added: “I think that’s probably optimistic political rhetoric. Just based on past (grant) attempts, where this money is going to is certainly not cities in Ventura County.”

Nonetheless, Carpenter said Kipp has already registered the department’s intent to apply for the grant with federal officials. “My hope is that it works,” the sheriff said, “but I think an 18% to 20% net increase is dreaming.”

Officials in the county’s other police departments--Port Hueneme and Simi Valley--said they too will be looking for ways to apply for the crime bill money. So will the county’s Department of Corrections Services and the district attorney’s office.

The Justice Department will issue its grant application forms in November and formalize what criteria will be needed to win grants, Adelman said. Until then, she said, it is impossible to determine who will get how much.

Roger Honberger, a lobbyist for Ventura County in Washington, said he estimates the federal government will allot enough money to hire 10,000 officers in California. But he said that local police are right to worry that Los Angeles’ police agencies will overshadow them when payout time comes.

“But they would be foolish not to apply,” Honberger said. He noted that the crime bill also had money for local governments in a section called the Local Partnership Act. The county and city governments are in line for about $3 million, according to congressional sources.

Honberger advised that the police agencies gear their grant proposals toward beefing up existing police programs with extra officers rather than simply hiring more line officers.

Fellow lobbyist Tom Walters predicted that agencies that recycle old applications from last fall’s appropriation could have new officers in as short of a time as six months.

Gallegly vowed to press for as much money as possible for the county, but he warned police departments not to wish for too much.

“There’s never going to be enough money to go around to satisfy all the needs,” Gallegly said. “There may not be 100% of what Santa Paula needs or what Oxnard needs. But there should definitely be enough money in this bill to provide some assistance.”

One Small Slice

The Local Partnership Act, one segment of the $30-billion crime bill, gives $216 million to local governments in California. Cities and counties may spend the money on education, drug treatment or jobs programs. Here’s an estimated breakdown of local shares.

Camarillo: $23,514

Fillmore: $49,603

Moorpark: $47,474

Ojai: $18,950

Oxnard: $1,183,897

Port Hueneme: $113,404

Santa Paula: $116,554

Simi Valley: $96,394

Thousand Oaks: $28,434

Ventura: $186,490

Ventura County: $1,300,000

Source: U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee