Photo courtesy of Solomon Crenshaw Jr.
Homewood Police Chief Tim Ross
The Homewood City Council Finance Committee heard some budget requests at its May 12 meeting that will set the stage for the budget process this fall.
Police Chief Tim Ross presented his plan to hire four new police officers so that he can transfer current officers to being school resource officers. Ross provided an overview of the current SRO deployment and the plan to replace contracted officers with full-time police officers.
“The last several years, we've used a mixture of full-time police officers to staff positions of SROs throughout the school system and retired police officers that we've made reserve officers with the city,” Ross said. “They're paid under contract by the Board of Education.”
Ross and Homewood Schools Superintendent Dr. Justin Hefner talked last year about staffing SROs, but the school board didn’t approve the action.
During the current school year, two contracted officers left the ranks. Ross noted that there is a high turnover rate with contracted officers.
“They don't stay very long in most cases,” he said. “We lost two during the school year, which kind of precipitated the conversations again [with] Dr. Hefner to do a different way of staffing. He has gotten approval by his board, and I wanted to bring it to the Finance Committee to request that we create four new police officer positions.”
The school system, through a contract with the city, reimburses 80% of the total benefits package for those officers and also picks up some of their costs for training, which is required to obtain certification to work in schools, and continuing education.
Committee member Carlos Alemán voiced concern about the proposal.
“I just want to say that as we move forward in the budget process that we're going to in September, these are the conversations that we're going to have to have,” he said. “We just added four new positions. While it's important, and I'm supportive, at the same time we have to make hard choices elsewhere.”
Council member Andy Gwaltney agreed: “If we spend this money here, we've got to find it somewhere else.”
“We're not growing the pot, and the federal funding stream is drying up,” Alemán said. “My concern is that we're not ready to fully commit to all the things that we already said that we want to do.”
Ross repeated that 80% of the expense for the new officers will be reimbursed, although the timing of that is unclear.
The Finance Committee sent a recommendation to the full council to hire the four officers, along with a budget amendment that transfers $250,000 to fund the hires. After the reimbursement from the school system, the city’s eventual net expense will be $50,000.
The committee also recommended a budget amendment to address overtime in the police department. The $95,000 budget amendment draws from the following items in the police budget:
Water: $25,000
Ammunition: $25,000
Fuels: $20,000
Wireless communication: $20,000
Physical fitness: $5,000
Additionally, the committee recommended authorizing the mayor to sign an easement agreement with Alabama Power to permit service to a CSpire Fiber Hub previously approved by the city. The hub will be at the soccer fields near Lakeshore Drive.
The Public Safety Committee again discussed a request to consider no-parking areas on portions of St. Charles Street and Stuart Street. The issue is possible problems for emergency vehicles to get through when there is heavy traffic.
“The fundamental problem is we have streets in neighborhoods that were designed in the ‘20s and ‘30s to accommodate Model-Ts and Model-As,” Ross said. “Now everyone drives a big SUV, and there’s simply not enough room to accommodate the vehicles that need to park at these residences or these businesses or a combination thereof that we’ve got right there at St. Charles and Oxmoor.
“We brought in some great business, which is great for the city, but this is the cost of it,” he continued. “I guess we’ve got to put these cars somewhere.”
The committee heard from about half a dozen residents about the matter. The committee ultimately dropped the discussion of yellow striping on one side of either street for now, to work on other solutions.
