Mar 3, 2008 7:40 am US/Pacific
Oakland City Council To Vote On Plan To Add Cops
OAKLAND (BCN) ―
The Oakland City Council will vote Tuesday night on a revised plan to hire more police officers.
Mayor Ron Dellums asked the City Council at its Feb. 19 meeting to allocate $7.7 million from Measure Y, a 2004 crime prevention ballot measure, to recruit and train more police so the city can reach his goal of having at least 803 officers by the end of the year.
The city is about 70 officers short of that goal now.
Instead, the council delayed voting and sent the matter to the Measure Y Oversight Committee and the council's Public Safety Committee for further study.
Dellums was upset by the delay, but on Friday he said, "I hope that on Tuesday the City Council will enact strategies to hire an appropriate number of police officers."
City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente said he thinks delaying a vote on the issue was the right thing to do because the Measure Y Oversight Committee, which is a panel of community residents that makes recommendations on how money is spent, deserved an opportunity to review Dellums' proposal.
De La Fuente said the revised plan going before the full City Council Tuesday night contains some of Dellums' recommendations but not all of them.
A key change is not using Measure Y money to fund the whole $7.7 million program to hire more officers, he said.
"It's a question of managing our resources," he said.
De La Fuente said he supports Dellums' idea to have four police training academies running simultaneously so the city can hire more officers more quickly.
Two of the academies would be run by the Oakland Police Department and two would be run by the Alameda County Sheriff's Department, he said.
De La Fuente said one change is reducing the marketing portion of the recruiting program from $1.5 million to $1 million but using $500,000 for signing bonuses for experienced officers who come to Oakland from other cities.
"We want to give $25,000 bonuses to officers who make lateral transfers from other cities," he said.
De La Fuente said although Oakland faces some tough budget issues, it is better off than many other cities and that might help in its effort to hire more officers.
In his state of the city address on Jan. 14, Dellums pledged to do "whatever it takes" to bring Oakland to its authorized level of 803 police officers by the end of the year.
De La Fuente said he's not sure Oakland can reach that goal by the end of the year, but he thinks it can get close to that level.
The City Council meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall at 1 Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland.
(© CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Bay City News contributed to this report.)
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