Monday, June 29, 2009 | Opinion
POLICE FURLOUGHS WILL END JULY 10, BUT THE TAX BATTLE HAS JUST BEGUN
Despite the tax increase passed by City Council today, the APD will lose 66 sworn officer positions. It is time to reconsider the sacred tax cows of the schools and Fulton County.
Atlanta’s insufferable public safety furloughs—the reason so many police and fire personnel are not to be found on Fridays—will end on July 10.
That’s the first Friday when all hands will be back at work, according to Chief Financial Officer Jim Glass.
One would think, given my constant kvetching on the topic, the high anxiety among the police officers and fire fighters, and the loud protests of the crime-chewed neighborhoods since Mayor Shirley Franklin instituted the furloughs last December 25, that there would be dancing in the streets now.
One would think that I would be posting something like, “WE WON!” and arranging to have margaritas with the city’s now-happy badge-wearers.
But one would be wrong.
Make no mistake, I am pleased the FY 2010 budget with its supporting 3-millage-point tax increase passed City Council today. And those City Council members who took such a brave stand in an election year deserve recognition. They were:
Carla Smith, Ivory Lee Young, Jr., Natalyn Archibong, Anne Fauver, Felicia Moore, C.T. Martin, Joyce Sheperd, Ceasar Mitchell, and H. Lamar Willis.
Atlantans should thank them for doing the right thing for the safety of the citizens.
I myself am not a fan of taxes, yet I pushed for the increase so the furloughs would end.
(I even—no, it wasn’t an optical illusion—shook the mayor’s hand during the council meeting because we were, after all, both in favor of the increase.)
But, ending the furloughs is not the end of the matter. Yes, the police, the firefighters and even the sanitation workers will get back to work full time in July, but keep in mind that the Atlanta Police Department will still be understaffed and the Department of Fire Rescue will still be subject to brown-outs—rolling closures of fire stations.
In fact, tucked away in the sheaf of pages that detail the budget the City Council passed, there are cuts to public safety. The APD will lose 66 sworn officer positions.
The International Brotherhood of Police Officers is relieved the furloughs are ending, says Sgt. Scott Kreher, president of the local union chapter, but the cut positions will “continue to impact out ability to ensure our department has the proper manpower to fight crime in a city the size of Atlanta.”
The positions are not filled—the APD has not been fully staffed in years—but they are funded, and in doing away with them, the mayor, whose budget this was, and the Council, who passed it, are signaling their hopes for landing a federal grant that will pay for more cops to be hired.
That’s a gamble.
Whether they’re looking at Obama’s general stimulus package for cities or at the Department of Justice’s COPS grant, the fact is, money is tight and the process for grants has never been more competitive. Considering the APD’s lack of innovative programs, I would be very surprised if the city lands funding from either source to any significant degree.
Ending the furloughs was a step in the right direction. But, it was only a first step. What lies ahead of the City of Atlanta is a battle for funding against two behemoths that suck up much more tax money than does the city: Atlanta Public Schools (which takes more than 50 percent of all tax revenues gathered from residents) and Fulton County, which takes an additional 25-plus percent.
Ironically, of the three government bodies, it is the city that responds most directly to the needs of the residents.
As Councilman Ivory Lee Young Jr. said, the city’s residents turn out in the Council Chamber to voice their feelings, and yet, “When the entity that gets more than 50 percent of the taxes meets, their chamber is empty. And the other entity that gets about 30 percent, when they meet, their chamber is empty.”
The school system is traditionally a sacred cow, so Young showed some spine in speaking up about it.
It’s as if, where schools are concerned, there should be no limit to the amount of money citizens fork over. But given the feedback that residents gave me last week in Kirkwood, saying that students from Crim High School roam the neighborhoods and that enforcing truancy laws against them is just about impossible because it’s an “open campus”—I think it’s high time to take a look at the relationship between schools and public safety, and public solvency.
Fulton County’s longtime profligacy is notorious, and yet the county continues to harvest more than a quarter of Atlanta’s tax money. Fulton County, too, has been something of a sacred cow as any suggestion of malfeasance has been met with accusations of racism.
But this is no time for sacred cows.
For while we may entertain ideas about a commuter tax—a measure that might actually backfire against the growth of the city—an overhaul of how existing revenue is sliced up between APS, Fulton County and City of Atlanta would be the most direct route toward greater financial stability.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t care about kids or education. I do. But I am not sure that the amount of money Atlanta’s taxpayers spend on the schools is justified.
And wanting to reduce the amount of money collected from Atlantans by Fulton County doesn’t mean that I’m a racist. I’m not, at least I certainly hope I’m not, and when I think of all the people of color who are suffering in Atlanta as a result of Fulton County’s disproportionate tax share, it seems unlikely that I am.
It is time to free those cows from the temple. It is time to fire up the grill. SP