A special Eureka City Council meeting has been called for 5 p.m today to pass a budget for the next fiscal year. It’s a budget that proposes large cuts to many city services, particularly the police and fire departments.

Overall, the city is looking at a $60 million operating budget for the 2014-15 fiscal year — down a little over six percent from last year’s $64 million. Of that, the Eureka Police Department is expected to trim around $900,000 from last year’s $13.6 million budget — a decrease of 6.5 percent — while the fire department is expected to hack off about $140,000, or 1.2 percent of its 2013-14 budget.

Leo Sears, a longtime former member of the city’s Finance Advisory Committee, is calling on his fellow citizens to show out tonight and protest the cuts — and also to slow down the budgeting process until new city manager Greg Sparks has time to catch up with the city’s needs. Time and again, he says, the citizens of Eureka have shown that police and fire services are far and away their top priority.

Sears said that there is no hard-and-fast deadline to get the budget passed before the start of the new fiscal year, and opined that the city council would do well to give this budget more thought. 

“They need to back off, give the city manager new directions and come forth with a budget that I consider reasonable,” he said. 

Though other city agencies are facing cuts greater or equal to the police department in the proposed budget, several historically contentious programs are emerging relatively unscathed. The draft budget proposes a 10 percent reduction in payments to the Eureka Chamber of Commerce and the Humboldt County Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, but those agencies are still scheduled to receive payments from the city totalling $571,500.

Meanwhile, the city’s contribution to the Sequoia Park Zoo is actually increased under the new budget — from $869,802 to $921,488, an increase of nearly 6 percent.

In his email blast to local citizen, Sears maintains that the proposed cuts to police services violate the spirit of Measure O, a 2010 ballot measure that slapped an extra half-cent of sales tax on purchases inside the city limits. That tax increase, he said, was promoted as a way to save emergency services in the city limits, and so those services should be prioritized when it comes time to save services in the face of a budget crisis.

(Paul Rodrigues, the city’s finance director, told the Outpost this morning that the great bulk of Measure O funds have, in fact, been used to save police and fire positions that were on the chopping block back in 2010, though he allowed that another significant portion of those funds have been used to pay back city reserves spent during the especially lean years following the collapse of the housing market in 2007.)

Also at the meeting tonight: The city council will vote to place a paid argument in favor of Measure Q — an extension of 2010’s Measure O — on the sample ballot for November’s election.

There is a mountain of documents available that attempt to break down the proposed budget at various levels of complexity. They can be found below, along with Leo Sears’ email blast rallying people to show up tonight. 

DOCUMENTS

LEO SEARS’ CALL TO ACTION

I know it’s an awfully short notice to ask you to be at Tuesday’s Eureka City Council meeting at 5:00, but it’s of extreme importance.

The first of the two items at this a special meeting is a public hearing and a resolution of the City Council adopting the budget for fiscal year beginning July 1, 2014.

If adopted at this meeting, it will cut millions of dollars from the public safety budgets – 10% across the board cuts - all in the name of being fair to other areas of city government.

I don’t believe that we passed measure O for it to be spread as an equal layer over the entire budget. The council’s commitment was to give public safety the very highest of priorities, and I don’t know of one piece of O’s publicity that didn’t say “vote to support public safety.”

I can’t get my head around the simplicity – perhaps I should simply call it laziness – of this approach to budgeting without weighing priorities. But I think maybe Councilman Newman summed it up by saying that to give public safety a priority they would have to cut more from other areas.

Well Duh! Weren’t they elected to look at the city’s needs and prioritize them in the city’s budget? What about their commitment that went along with measure O?

And to top it all off, they’re putting measure Q on the November ballot to extend measure O.

When they won’t keep the commitments that were made when they asked us to “Vote O Yes to support Public Safety”, what kind of dummies do they think we are?

I hope you will be with me Tuesday, to say your piece or so support those of us who do. There is strength in numbers, and packing city hall is what it is going to take to have them change course.

Please. Please. Join us. The last thing we want or deserve are cuts to public safety.