City budget hearings don’t often involve council members urging a department to plan to spend a lot more money. But that happened when the Department of Public Safety sat down with Cleveland City Council to discuss its 2025 spending forecast.
Two line items — for police overtime and building maintenance — struck the council members as far too low. And near the end of the proceedings, a member took a swipe at a neighbor who owes Cleveland money.
You can read more about the hearing in Documenter Dean Jackson’s notes. For a primer on the budget process, read this.
Police overtime and recruitment
Council Member Mike Polensek asked why the department had budgeted $14 million for police overtime when “if you look at your overtime costs over the last four years, they’re usually double that.” (That was a slight exaggeration. The totals were $22 million in 2022, almost $26.4 million in 2023 and an estimated $26.9 million in 2024.)
Chief Finance Officer Paul Barrett said that the move to 12-hour shifts in 2023 has “slowed the growth rate” of overtime costs and that filling more vacancies this year “hopefully” will bring spending down more. He added that raising the budgeted amount could “incentivize” higher spending when “we want to work towards reaching that goal of $14 million.”
Polensek was not convinced. Bringing OT costs down that much is “not even a possibility” given the current size of the police force, he said. (In January there were 1,137 police officers, more than 200 short of Mayor Justin Bibb’s goal of 1,350. But the rate of decline may be slowing. Last year was the first since 2019 that more people joined the Cleveland police than left.)
Public Safety Director Dornat “Wayne” Drummond assured council that the department is working to meet the goal of bringing 180 new recruits into the academy by the end of the year. Council Member Richard Starr told Drummond that the division needs to look at retirements too.
“When I see commanders leaving when they only have a couple more years before they can get all of their benefits and retiring, that’s alarming to me,” Starr said. He also said that the 12-hour shift is unpopular among some officers and may be an obstacle to recruitment.
Too little for maintenance of police and fire stations?
Council members seemed baffled by how little the department had budgeted for maintenance of the five police district headquarters — $76,000.
“Have you guys been to the districts?” asked Council Member Charles Slife. “Sorry, you don’t have to answer that, it was a sarcastic question. … I don’t believe $76,000 is enough for maintenance for one of the districts, let alone for five of them.”
He added that it’s “commendable but also frustrating” that officers are often putting their own time and money into maintaining the buildings. Council Member Kerry McCormack called the $76,000 “shocking.” Repairs in the locker room of the Second District alone would consume nearly the entire allotment, he added.
Drummond conceded that, aside from Third District, “the buildings are dated.” He added that major repairs like replacing roofs and garage doors would fall under the capital budget, which covers investments in buildings and other infrastructure.
Slife said he hopes that the condition of the district buildings is a priority in the capital budget hearings later this year. “If we want to convey that we are a community-oriented police department, I don’t think that our buildings convey that,” he said.
Later, Slife described the $15,000 allotted for fire station maintenance as “woefully inadequate.”
Council did not ask Mayor Justin Bibb to add more to the budget for maintenance or overtime in reconciliation, the process of negotiating their differences over spending priorities.
Sending Bratenahl to collections
The hearing revealed that Bratenahl, the village that occupies a sliver of lakefront property between the Intercity and Northeast yacht clubs, owes Cleveland about $700,000 for fire services. Drummond said the two municipalities have worked out a payment plan and Bratenahl should be caught up by the end of the year.
“They’re gonna have to get their driver’s license revoked or something,” joked Slife. “They’re pulling over our drivers, they can’t pay our money?”
He seemed to be referring to the Bratenahl Police Department’s reputation for pulling over and ticketing Black drivers passing through the mostly white village.
