ELYRIA — The police chief says he’ll lose a fourth of his department. The acting fire chief figures his department will end up staffing only one of its four stations.

Those will be the realities, they say, if voters defeat the city’s effort on the November ballot to renew a longstanding income tax. The same issue was rejected overwhelmingly in March.

If defeated, the city will lose the $6 million a year raised by the tax, which has been in place since the 1970s and provides a good chunk of the city’s general fund. To combat the loss, cuts will have to be made, and they’ll likely be centered on the police and fire departments.

“It would be premature to say what kinds of cuts would be made in what departments, but police and fire make up well over half of general fund expenses, and aside from a few grants, there is no revenue that comes into those departments to offset the cost,” Mayor Bill Grace said. “Recognizing that, should we not have the income tax revenue, an overwhelming amount of cuts would come from those departments.”

That reality has Police Chief Michael Medders wondering daily what choices he might have to make if his department’s budget takes the colossal hit.

“It’s no probably about it. We would have no choice but to lay people off,” he said. “I’m getting about $7.5 million from the general fund, and even though I know we are down to just 87 officers, I’m guessing the number would be about 21 to 23 officers would have to be let go.”

Such a move would drastically affect response time in a city that handles about 40,000 calls per year.

“If we have to lose that many officers, we will still have to handle our calls, but we would have to start stacking them,” Medders said. “That means if it’s not a life-or-death call, we would have to get to it when we can. That’s not how we like to operate, because when people call us, they want to see us in a timely fashion.”

Auditor Ted Pileski, who spends his days going over the city’s finances, said he knows city residents would prefer cuts in other departments if the budget had to be slashed.

However, he also knows that to balance the budget without the income tax revenue, he would have to go after the biggest departments first.

“I know what people are saying, but I could start at the law director’s office and lose everyone on the list going down and still not have $6 million,” Pileski said Oct. 17 as he went over a summary report detailing how the general fund was doled out in 2008. “You can’t cut into a budget like this without losing some people. We would have to go to where the employees are because that is where most of the money is.”

While the Police Department receives funding from a dedicated tax levy, it still received 21.97 percent of the general fund in 2008. And Medders said he spends roughly 87 percent of his budget on wages and salaries.

“We don’t have a lot of fluff in the department,” he said.

The Police Department’s funding is only slightly behind the Fire Department’s 26.18 percent portion of the general fund, which in 2008 included $1 million to cover the cost of a new ladder truck.

In the short time he has served as interim fire chief, Joe Pronesti said he has quickly educated himself about just how important the income tax renewal is to the Fire Department.

While he will not be the one to make decisions for the department should the renewal fail — Pronesti will return to the position of captain on Nov. 9 — he said he knows the department can’t sustain another cut.

The decision a year ago to drop minimum manning from 17 firefighters to 14 essentially made it impossible to keep Fire Station No. 2 open. Losing more firefighters — including the seven newly hired ones — to layoff will make it impossible to keep all three of the other stations open.

“My recommendation would be to go down to one station and handle the calls together like that,” Pronesti said. “I won’t be the chief when it comes down to making that decision, but I know from experience that we won’t be able to run the stations we have if we lose more guys because that tax goes down.”

Elyria Municipal Court, which employs 40 full-time workers, receives the next biggest amount of the budget, 8.01 percent. However, Pileski said drastic cuts could not be made to there because the judges could just order the fund restored.

Grace said that Parks and Recreation, another large department with 43 employees and 6.96 percent of the budget, also would see cuts, possibly to the programs offered by the city.

Contact Lisa Roberson at 329-7121 or lroberson@chroniclet.com.

 

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