ELYRIA – For years, the Elyria Police Department has slowly lost officers and watched its equipment decay.

As Police Chief Duane Whitely put it, police officers don’t whine. They just make do.

But now, the department is speaking up – saying all the things that haven’t been said for years: The department is undermanned, undertrained and outgunned, and the only way to fix the problems is with money – lots of taxpayer money.

Elyria police are set to crank up the volume in the coming months to convince voters that a tax increase is the only way to stem the rising tide of crime and boost the Police Department’s staffing and training levels.

The push will not be easy.

Not only is the city asking for a tax increase, it is asking for one that is complicated and will result in the Police Department receiving half of the money from the city’s income tax and a third of the city’s overall revenue.

The plan has not been unanimously accepted by City Council, and the Council-appointed Financial Review Board, made up of community members, publicly has said it does not agree with it because it will eliminate the city’s longstanding 0.50 percent temporary tax.

Councilwoman Mary Siwierka, D-at large, voted against putting the issue before voters because, in her opinion, the levy is so slanted toward the needs of the Police Department that the rest of the city’s departments eventually will get pinched.

“The intent of the levy is excellent, but the structure is like a house of sticks,” she said. “It’s built without a foundation for the rest of the city, and that is what we should be looking at.”

The tax plan was introduced by Mayor Bill Grace, who is coming off arguably the toughest 12 months of his mayoral career, and governing in the midst of the longest and deepest economic decline in recent history. He may have survived an attempted recall in late 2009, but he learned that many residents don’t trust him to govern, and that’s something he has to overcome as he tries to convince them that this tax is the way to go.

Changing times

Whitely, a career officer who started with the Elyria Police Department in 1990 and cut his teeth knocking down doors as a part of the department’s Neighborhood Impact Unit, knows selling a tax increase to residents will be hard.

Job losses are high in Elyria. The city’s unemployment rate has been at or near double digits for years. Vacant and foreclosed homes dot Elyria neighborhoods from east to west.

In a lot of ways, Whitely said, residents are just struggling to get by. But so is the Elyria Police Department, and that is something he said residents need to know.

“If people really knew why we did what we do and all the reasons for how we operate, I really think they would go for this tax,” he said. “We need a lot, and this levy will let us get the job done at a quicker rate.”

Still, Whitely admits, in a lot of ways he is stuck between a rock and a hard place. How does he tell residents just what the department needs without jeopardizing officer safety by revealing too much about the department?

“At one point, I can remember the Elyria Police Department was the department people wanted to be at,” he said. “Our training and equipment was near the top. We used to go to other departments and cherry-pick their best and brightest because they wanted to be here. Now, they are cherry-picking from us.”

From a resident’s standpoint, it may be hard to see where that changed. From an administrator’s standpoint, which is the view Whitely has each day as he turns down requests from officers who want better equipment or more training because he doesn’t have the funds, the change can be reduced to two words.

“No money,” he said. “Our budget has been cut little by little each year.”

Police are priority

Former City Council member Kevin Brubaker, who when on Council was known to periodically ride along with officers for an up-close view of the department, said there is not just one reason why the department is operating below authorized strength and without adequate equipment.

“It’s a number of different things. No. 1 is the economy. All of the departments in the city are down,” said Brubaker, who has joined forces with others in the community to chair the levy committee’s campaign. “In the Police Department, we are down because we have lost people to other departments and haven’t hired replacements.”

Brubaker said he can’t speculate on why former Police Chief Mike Medders didn’t push the city to hire more aggressively. Regardless, Brubaker said, worrying about the past does not help the Police Department’s future.

He said he has heard residents question why the levy is needed now, why the levy has to be a permanent tax and whether they can trust the administration.

“I don’t think there is ever a good time to raise taxes, but this is a good time for the right reasons to raise taxes,” he said. “If it passes, this could change a lot of things in the department. More officers on the street, better equipment and newer police cruisers – those things alone will boost morale in the department.”

With so much on the line, Grace admits he is betting it all on this latest income tax proposal.

“The most important element of a community’s quality of life is its safety and there is nothing more important than working to ensure that safety,” he said recently. “Our Police Department is our highest priority.”

Grace is not taking that commitment lightly.

At his office in City Hall, scattered papers printed with graphs, numbers and comparison charts allow Grace see where Elyria’s department ranks against other comparable cities in the state.

“I think we have done an exceptional job at providing the level of service we have at a tax rate of 1.75 percent,” he said. “We are the largest city in Ohio operating with a tax rate under 2 percent. But 2 percent is where we need to be if we are going to survive as a city providing the quality of life residents desire in their city.”

Whitely, serving in his first year as chief, said he believes that can be attributed to the way the Police Department has operated for years. While other departments were overbudget, the Police Department always managed to stay within budget, he said.

Yet staying within budget year after year has not been easy, especially recently.

The jail is closed, and the part-time staff is a fraction of what it once was.

“The Police Department has taken substantial hits,” Grace said. “Equipment is in deplorable conditions. Officers are not training as much as we would like them to, and new officers are not being hired at the same rate we are losing officers, which means our number of sworn officers is nowhere near where it should be.”

That declaration brings Grace back to his goal to staff and equip the department at a more adequate level.

“We are in a position where we need to restore funding to the Police Department in order to bring staffing to 100 officers and have the right amount of equipment to do the job right,” he said.

The plan

Should the police levy pass in November, Whitely said he has a plan to address everything.

The No. 1 priority is officers, he said. Elyria now has 82 officers.

The department’s authorized strength is 102 officers, but that number has been more of a suggestion than a rule. Since January 1992, the department topped 100 officers just two times – for fewer than two months in 1995 and fewer than three months in 1998.

Even with the passage of a police levy in 1992 that was supposed to mean steady employment for 100 officers, the city has been unable to fulfill that goal.

“The last time we hired a police officer was September 2007 – nearly three years ago,” Whitely said. “That is a big gap in hiring. The last time we had a gap that was any larger was between 1986 and 1990, when we hired 11 officers after a four-year break.”

Still, Whitely said, he will not just hire large groups of officers at one time.

Doing so is taxing on the department’s training officers. Instead, he said, hires will be done in small groups and rotated in so officers are training rookies while potential recruits are attending the police academy.

“It’s not as simple as just hiring a guy and teaming him up with a veteran officer for a few weeks and calling that police training,” Whitely said. “If the new hires have already gone through the academy, they still will need at least 14 weeks of department training before they can go on the road alone. If they have not gone through the academy, you can add another 16 weeks to that.”

Next, Whitely said, he will start buying new police cruisers, car radios and firearms.

Finally, he said, officers will start training more. Select officers will learn the ins and outs of being field technicians, evidence collectors and accident reconstructionists.

Whitely said residents may be wondering a lot of things in the months and weeks leading up to the Nov. 2 general election, but questioning if the Elyria Police Department will effectively use the funds should not be a concern.

“It does not mean we will start spending money without regard to what we are doing.” he said.

Resources and responsibilities

Those long tenured in law enforcement said money alone can’t produce dramatic changes in any police department.

“It’s not all about money,” said retired police chief William Moulder, president of the Iowa-based police consulting firm Moulder and Associates.

“It’s about knowing the mission of your police department and making sure resources are lined up so you can carry out that mission,” he said. “When that is not enough, you can only make your case to the community in a clear fashion and hope they go for it.”

When a police department finds itself in a situation where it does not have the resources to get the job done, Moulder said it has to be willing to change the mission of the department by outsourcing responsibilities to other entities.

Elyria has already done that by giving up a huge role in law enforcement: the operation of a city jail.

At a cost of more than $1.2 million, operating a jail was deemed a luxury that could no longer be afforded and it was shut down in late 2009. Suspects arrested for violent crimes are sent to the Lorain County Jail, while nonviolent misdemeanor arrests are given citations and sent on their way.

If the needs are pressing enough and the public will is there, an aggressive two- to five-year plan can turn around a deficient department, Moulder said.

With more than 40 years of experience, including 18 years as chief of the Des Moines Police Department, Moulder said he has dealt with times of financial certainty and times of financial straits that caused him to make conscious decisions to cut services before cutting officers.

Moulder said he finds it shocking to hear the Elyria Police Department operates in such a fashion that training for officers is limited, equipment is outdated and the workforce is aging faster than new recruits are being hired.

“I feel for the chief, whoever he is,” Moulder said. “That is a hard place to be.”

Moulder said that if he were in Whitely’s shoes, he would work the levy like a case heading to court.

“I would start building databases of information to show residents what we do,” he said. “I would be going to great length to explain what we do, why we do it, how we do it and how 15 or 20 more officers will allow us to do it better. It’s hard to do and not as sexy to just use hard numbers to sell a levy. It’s easier to say, ‘If I don’t have this many police officers when you call, it will take me this long to get to your house when you call.’ ”

Tom Baracskai, president of the Elyria Police Patrolmen’s Association, said officers are thinking like Moulder and using straight facts and not scare tactics to sell the levy.

“We were just like other residents when we heard about this tax issue,” Baracskai said. “It just sounded too good to be true and got us thinking, ‘What’s the catch?’ We knew we could not go out and sell this to residents as a police levy if – in a year – the administration was just going to start pinching off the money for other things.”

To quiet those concerns, the union hired an outsider to look over the proposal and wording of the corresponding legislation.

“That’s the only way we were willing to get behind this,” Baracskai said. “We had to know residents were going to get what they are being told.”

With new funds going into a special fund just for the Police Department, dipping into the pot will be illegal, said city Auditor Ted Pileski.

And even if it ties the hands of the mayor, which many people including Whitely said it will, Grace said he is OK with the administration losing some flexibility or control over the fund.

“We won’t get the money if we don’t do it this way,” Grace said. “So why worry about flexibility with money we won’t receive? Our Police Department is by far our biggest expense in the city, and I think people will fall in line with giving financial priority to our most important department.”

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

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