LAWTON — Four of the five candidates for the Ward 2 seat on the Lawton City Council outlined their ideas Tuesday for reducing Lawton’s crime rate and helping the city live within its means.
Candidates Shelli Fox, Justin Hackney and Mark Malone fielded questions from the stage of the Vaska Theatre, which Hackney owns. The fourth candidate, Kelly Harris, was unable to attend the event but submitted written responses to several questions from forum organizers.
Organizers said they were unable to reach the fifth candidate, Richard Strickland, before the forum.
The SW OK Freedom Fighters group hosted the event, which gave the candidates for the Ward 2 seat one last chance to make a pitch to voters before Tuesday’s election.
Reducing the crime rate
The candidates agreed that Lawton should take steps to reduce its crime rate by hiring more police officers, among other measures.
The Lawton Police Department is 25 officers short of its normal level and 50 officers short of its authorized full-strength capacity, Harris said.
“It’s time to focus on hiring and training a new class of officers and candidates,” he said in a written response, read by the moderator. “Just having more officers doesn’t prevent crime from happening, though. We have to address the root cause of crime.”
Fox said drug addiction is the primary cause of most crime in Lawton. She said the city should focus on offering more activities for children and reviving programs designed to reduce substance abuse.
“Back in the day, they used to have the DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) program and various other kids’ programs,” Fox said. “We need to be able to bring those things back.”
Hackney said he thought the Lawton Police Department should change its approach to dealing with juvenile offenders. He said the city used to have a Community Intervention Center, a government-run program for juvenile offenders, and he would like to see Lawton bring that idea back.
“While that wasn’t a city program, we need a city program like that that can’t be taken away from our city,” he said.
Malone agreed with the other candidates that the city needs more police officers on the street. He added that Lawton is divided into nine zones, but each zone has only one officer because the police department is short-handed.
That means when a police officer goes out on a call and summons an officer from another zone as backup, that zone has no coverage for the length of the call, Malone said.
“If that happens two or three times across the city simultaneously, you have three of four zones out of police officers,” he said.
Staying within budget
The candidates also shared their ideas for making sure the city sticks to its budget without raising utility fees.
Malone said he thought the city should require its department heads to brief the Lawton City Council on their spending plans.
“At least the division heads, if not their deputies as well, should come before the council and explain, ‘Why are you asking for this?’ and go into it,” he said.
Hackney proposed cutting administrative staff and directing the resulting savings to other areas.
“I think a water bill raise is absolutely out of the question until we figure out the problem in the administration, as well as when the city manager’s and assistant city manager’s raise come up for a vote,” he said. “I think we all know what the answer to that vote should be.”
But Fox said she thought council members should learn more about what city officials do before proposing staff cuts or salary reductions.
“Now, I’m not saying there aren’t cuts that can’t be made in the administrative level,” she said. “But I think until – like Mark said – maybe we have somebody come up and explain to us what they’re spending that money on and why they need that assistance, maybe we shouldn’t decide that they don’t need them.”
In his response, Harris noted that the city’s ability to generate income is limited to sales tax revenue and utility fees. He added that if sales tax revenue stays at the same level or continue to drop due to the pandemic, barring the city from raising utility rates could lead to financial disaster.
“That requires massive cuts in service to the community,” Harris said. “There is a cost to having services that we will benefit from.”