LPD barely touched by budget cuts

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  • LPD barely touched by budget cuts
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LAWTON – Recent claims that the Lawton City Council “defunded” the Police Department in the new city budget for Fiscal Year 2021 are a gross exaggeration, Mayor Stan Booker said Tuesday.

The Police Department budget was trimmed to $19,829,641. That constituted a reduction of $61,654 – three-tenths of 1 percent – from the department’s FY 2020 budget of $19,891,295.

Full-time positions in the Police Department were reduced by 17: from 245 in FY 2020 to 228 in FY 2021.

Despite the personnel reduction, the Lawton Police Department still has more sworn officers per capita than at least three larger cities in Oklahoma, City Manager Michael Cleghorn said:

  • Norman (population 126,377): officers, 171
  • Broken Arrow (population 110,135): officers, 139
  • Edmond (population 93,849): officers, 163
  • Lawton (population 92,543): officers, 176

Personnel Cuts Spread Around

The city budget for FY 2021, which began July 1, includes savings “by continuing the current hiring freeze and not funding some positions,” Cleghorn reported in June. “In all, more than 50 positions were eliminated,” he wrote in a public letter issued Monday to the residents of Lawton. The “vast majority” of those personnel cuts “have been made through attrition,” he said.

Three of the city’s largest departments – police, public works and public utilities – all experienced “significant reductions” in personnel allocations in the FY 2021 budget, Cleghorn wrote.

The Public Works department lost 11 full-time positions and experienced a $2.3 million, 15 percent budget reduction from last year, documents indicate. Parks & Recreation lost two full-time positions and had its budget cut by 4.62 percent.

Positions also were eliminated in the city’s manager’s office, the city’s legal department, information technology, engineering, community services, the Fire Department, the municipal library, and the finance department.

Almost all capital outlay and rolling stock purchases have been suspended until revenue supports the expenditures, Cleghorn announced in June. The FY 2020 budget included almost $6.5 million for capital outlay; that category was slashed by nearly 83 percent, to $1.1 million in the adopted budget for FY 2021.

$2M+ Invested In LPD Technology

Although training budgets were “significantly reduced across the entire City organization, all required training is still taking place for all personnel within all departments” of the City of Lawton, Cleghorn wrote.

Both the police and fire departments have academies for new hires scheduled this fall and next spring, he said.

Additionally, the city has invested more than $2 million in technological upgrades for Lawton police officers over the past 18 months “to ensure public safety officials have the most efficient tools and systems in place to safeguard the community,” Cleghorn noted. Those improvements have included 150 e-ticketing devices, wifi-enabled mobile data terminals in police cruisers, and body cams for officers

The city is upgrading the standard handgun for all members of the LPD, and the department is expected to move into the new $33.7 million state-of-the-art Public Safety Facility by next spring.

Entry-level base salaries for Lawton police officers have risen by more than 30 percent since 2015, and police officers have received incentive pay bonuses averaging between $3,000 and $4,000 in each of the last six years, the city manager related. “Eligible officers also receive annual step raise increases of 5 percent.”

“We have not taken any money from the Police Department and transferred it to social programs,” Booker said.

Pandemic Disrupted State, Local Economy

“Constructing and working to forecast a budget during the COVID-19 pandemic” – which struck Oklahoma in mid-March – “resulted in the expectation of budget amendments by the City Council, as needed, as the situation continues to develop in our community and state,” Cleghorn wrote.

In a message to the mayor and city council dated June 18 in which he submitted the proposed new budget, the city manager noted that the global pandemic has had a “severe economic impact” on the State of Oklahoma and on Lawton. As a result, “this is a unique and challenging budget situation never before experienced here.”

For the first time “in modern recollection,” the city staff prepared a municipal budget fully expecting to ask the City Council to amend it “in the first or second quarter of FY 2021,” Cleghorn wrote. “At that time we will bring back the best projections of revenues and additional budget reductions or increases as new data may indicate.”

The FY 2021 budget the council approved in June was merely a “preliminary” document, “a starting point, a place holder” that allowed the City of Lawton to begin the new fiscal year “as required by law.”