Understanding the Saratoga Springs, NY 2020 Police Department Budget — Part 1
On Wednesday, July 1, 2020, Saratoga Springs Public Safety Commissioner Robin Dalton and Chief of Police Shane Crooks will hold the first meeting in a series of “Community Conversations”. The event will be on Zoom from 5–6:30pm, and the Zoom link will be posted in the Facebook event the day-of the event.
In advance of this event, we wanted to better understand the budgets for our our Public Safety and Police Departments, as well as for other social programs that may compete with them for funding. Should we be spending more or less on public safety? How do we know? Are we adequately funding other programs? How do we think about our police budget given the current deficit from reduced tourism and social distancing?
We believe these are important questions that require data and analytics to answer. Yet accessing the relevant data in a meaningful form was not easy. Accordingly, we have researched and summarized some of the publicly available data to provide a context in which we can think about these questions and come prepared to the upcoming “Community Conversation.”
Budgeting for the Saratoga Springs Police Department
The city of Saratoga Springs posts two main budget documents on its website: a proposed budget summary and the 2020 Adopted Budget. The single page summary does not break out Public Safety into Law Enforcement and Fire Department. In contrast, the Adopted Budget is 184 pages long and is a scanned pdf with no text or ability to download or copy it into a spreadsheet. The report itself is a list of revenue and expenses broken down by the city’s chart of accounts. It provides no additional analysis beyond raw numbers. It also has no summary or roll-up for the total Police Department budget.
Of note, Saratoga Springs uses “Munis” from Tyler Technologies as its financial accounting and Enterprise Resource Planning software. Munis advertises its Business Intelligence and Analytics as helping “you work more efficiently by providing the business intelligence tools you need to be more responsive to your stakeholders.” Munis also includes the ability to export data to Microsoft Excel, which would make it much simpler to analyze our budget detail. Furthermore, Munis offers transparency as a benefit:
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Since our city leaders don’t make that functionality available, we’ve assembled our own analysis of city spending on the Police Department. Saratoga Springs spends $27.4 million, or 57% of our budget on public safety and within that $15.6 million on our Police Department. With a total city budget of $48.7 million, that means about $1 in every $3 goes to the Police Department.
So is $15.6 million a bargain or are we paying more than we need to? To provide some context for that question, we compared Saratoga Springs to two other similar cities. As we are often reminded, Saratoga Springs is one of the top 100 small cities in America as ranked by Wallethub. So we chose our two comparable cities from that list, each with a similar population.
We started with Leawood, Kansas, which is the number 1 small city. Next we added Shakopee, Minnesota. Shakopee has a similar population size and is home to the Canterbury Park Horse Track, which runs 70 racing days in the summer. Historic downtown Shakopee features numerous small town boutiques, restaurants, and a nearby casino. Sound familiar? Saratoga Springs and Shakopee have similar safety rankings, which indicates a similar level of crime and police activity. Here’s a summary of the cities’ ranking on Wallethub.com:
Next we looked at the Public Safety budgets for all three cities. As you can see, Leawood’s city budget is $18 million higher than Saratoga Springs, but they spend $7 million less on public safety to keep their additional 6,000 people safe. Our spending on public safety, as a percentage of the city’s budget, is approximately twice Leawood’s and three times Shakopee’s percentage.
Finally, we looked specifically at the police budget within Public Safety. Again, we are higher than our peers. Both Leawood and Shakopee spend less dollars on policing even with larger total city budgets. Leawood spends 40% less per citizen on policing, while Shakopee spends 60% less.
Are there cities that spend more per capita than Saratoga Springs? Almost certainly. But this analysis aims to compare ourselves to best in class cities, including one with a similar, seasonal tourism economy.
In the wake of Covid-19 companies and municipalities have already taken action, including closing locations, reducing services, layoffs, furloughs, and pay reductions. Yet we haven’t furloughed a single officer. Crime and calls to the police are down across the country because social distancing is keeping many of us at home.
Saratoga Springs also has a higher number of senior police staff than our comparison cities, which presents an opportunity to bring our spending in line. Reducing our senior police staffing has the added bonus of cutting where the money is, rather than starting at the bottom of the career ladder. In some jurisdictions, city contracts with the police require a “last hired, first fired” approach to layoffs, which is why it’s also important that Saratoga Springs makes our PBA agreements public. Here is a comparison of senior staffing:
Budgeting for Community Services in Saratoga Springs
So, if we are spending more than our peers on policing, what are the alternatives? Are they fully funded? Are we better off with higher spending on policing? Again, we set out to research and summarize some of the publicly available data to help us form our opinion.
Community services, such as funding for Shelters of Saratoga, Veteran’s Allowance, Economic Opportunity Council (EOC), Saratoga Center for the Family, Franklin Community Center, etc. cumulatively represent less than 1% of the total general fund.
These programs, housed within the Mayor’s budget, account for $302,920 in the 2020 budget, which is just 0.6% of the General Fund, and in 2019 and 2018 these programs were 0.8% and 0.6% of the General Fund, respectively. Shelters of Saratoga is also funded by Saratoga County.
Any discussion of public safety must include these services that keep our community members safe, sheltered, and fed. These are organizations and programs we should be investing in but instead, they are often the first considered for cuts.
Saratoga Springs has an unfortunate history of pushing our house-less residents into the shadows, as many might recall the 2016 sidewalk sitting ban and residents suing the Planning Board over the proposed site of the cold-weather homeless shelter. In a 2019 interview, Robin Dalton, current Public Safety Commissioner, reported that 70% of police calls involve homeless individuals.
Likewise, a Department of Justice report found that low income, minority residents are most often at the receiving end of police enforcement. Worse, they are facing increased rates of criminal charges for minor offences and the associated expenses. Over-policing our low-income and minority residents will only exacerbate poverty and homelessness. But re-allocating some police funding to hire social workers, mental health specialists, clinicians, and others to staff our proven programs will make our community safer.
With Cuomo’s June 12th Executive Order on police reform, we have a tremendous opportunity to reimagine how our budget can support the needs of our most vulnerable residents and how we can reinvest in our city to benefit all of us. Looking at Saratoga’s budget for 2018–2020, the city’s meager contributions to social service programs must be multiplied and important budget items that have had zero funding in recent history should be revived. For one, there is Solomon Northup Day, a holiday commemorating Northup, an abolitionist and Saratoga resident whose autobiography “Twelve Years a Slave” was adapted into an Oscar-award winning movie. In addition, public services like safe roadways, sidewalks, and bikeways improve our health and increase access to transportation for all residents, which is timely given the current pandemic where public transit is limited.
For decades, the reflex of our governments (local, state, and national) has been to protect and expand police budgets. We have gone too far. Policing has become the largest single burden on our budget, and its steady growth has squeezed out other priorities which can improve our quality of life and keep us safe with less expense and less danger. Now, as we struggle with revenue loss from COVID-19, we have an opportunity to reimagine public safety for the future and embrace a new vision.
You can find a follow up to this post that addresses some of the feedback I’ve gotten here.
This blog post was written by Jennifer Natyzak, Eddy Abraham, and John Schroeder.
