Metro to seek budget increase

Jace Radke

Monday, Feb. 23, 2004 | 11:08 a.m.

The tentative Metro Police budget for the upcoming fiscal year requests an 11 percent increase over this year's budget and includes funding for 145 additional officers.

The budget, released this morning at a Metro fiscal affairs meeting, asks for more than $390.5 million, up from the $352 million that the department received this year.

The $352 million that the city and county agreed to provide to Metro this year was a 10.2 percent increase over the department's funding for the previous year, but was short of the 25 percent increase that Sheriff Bill Young originally requested. Young had asked for about $400 million to hire more officers to help offset the population growth in the Las Vegas Valley.

The budget for the coming fiscal year, which begins July 1, would fund current staffing and programs at Metro and add 145 commissioned officers: 120 for patrol, 15 for detective bureaus and 10 traffic officers. An additional 18 civilian positions brings the total number of budgeted personnel to 3,443 -- 2,296 commissioned officers and 1,147 civilians.

In a letter that accompanies the 84-page budget draft, Young states that the needs for additional personnel are pressing.

"The 650 additional officers provided by the 1988 and 1997 ballot questions have been hired, trained and deployed; but the community has continued to grow rapidly over the past five years," Young states in the letter. "The authorized commissioned staffing is 1.7 officers for each 1,000 residents in the jurisdiction as of July 2003, which falls well below the original goal of two officers per 1,000 expressed during the ballot question campaigns."

The additional 145 officers requested in the 2004-05 budget would boost the ratio to 1.8 officers per 1,000 residents, Young said.

The national average for all areas is 2.5 officers per 1,000, and 4.6 for major metropolitan areas of 1 million or more, Metro officials said.

The Clark County Commission, which is responsible for covering 59.6 percent of the Metro budget, was scheduled to look at the budget request on Tuesday. The agenda item is only to make sure that the correct funding formula was used by Metro, a county spokeswoman said.

Las Vegas is responsible for funding 40.4 percent of the Metro budget. Both local government entities are scheduled to hold hearings on the proposed budget in May.

Metro has used flexibility in its staffing to help meet the needs of residents over the past year, according to Young, who cites the use of light-duty officers to supplement staffing and help take non-emergency calls at the 911 center.

More than 3.32 million calls were taken by the 911 center during the last fiscal year, with 865,283 being emergency calls. The total number of calls are expected to exceed 3.4 million in this fiscal year, Metro officials said.

Metro officials estimate that officers responded to 644,071 calls for service in 2003, and that 90,666 felony crimes were committed in the department's jurisdiction.