By Thia James

Police budget ‘not a growth budget’: Chief

Mar 14, 2013 | 12:36 PM

With the Prince Albert Police Service requesting more than $1.076 million in 2013, its chief is clear—this is not a growth budget.

“We’re not asking for new things,” said Chief Troy Cooper. “What the growth, the increase in our budget is the result of increasing costs of salaries and benefits and pensions.”

He said the police have worked “really hard to maintain the budget that we’ve had over the last few years” and it is not a growth budget. “It’s a budget that’ll allow us to present a similar sort of service over the next year.”

Staffing-related costs account for close to 90 per cent of the Prince Albert Police’s preliminary budget.

More than $15 million of the $17.3 million in expenses are salaries, wages and benefits. That represents an increase of $1.5 million over the previous year’s budgeted amount of $13.8 million.

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It’s looking to increase this year’s budget to $14.153 million, compared to last year’s $13.076 million. Offsetting that is the $3.4 million it made in revenues. User charges accounted for $849,530 of that amount.

Cooper said the higher proportion of staffing costs to other expenses is standard in the industry. “That’s basically what our budget has always been. We don’t have much in our industry other than the people who work here.”

Aside from staff, the police service has a few buildings and police cars, he said. “Salary costs are 80 to 90 percent of every police budget, that’s normal.”

As for the cost of its fleet, that amount remains unchanged at $556,800. “Every year we transfer money from our capital budget to pay for our fleet. We transfer roughly $200,000 a year from our capital budget into our fleet.”

On the capital side, there is a police capital request of $441,800 included in the police budget. This is used to purchase tactical equipment, protective vests, computers and camera systems.

“We find that generally that’s what makes up the bulk of our capital purchases, is software, computers and information technology-related expenditures.”

The police service, he said, presented to the board the “exact details of what it is we’d like to purchase for that amount.”

However, Cooper said the request for a new $165,000 HVAC system for the police station (in the general fund capital requests) was submitted by city officials. He said wasn’t a part of the police service’s budget submission.

As for the summary nature of the budget presented in the public document – that’s what the Board of Police Commissioners provides to the budget committee, Cooper said. The police budget document the chief provides to the board is a detailed, line-by-line budget.

“They approve it and they send it to the budget committee in council. And they send it in more of a generalized format. They don’t have all the details broken out into – they have sort of a summary budget and then a total cost.”

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames