posted by Mike Madison at 7:27 AM /
The following copy of a letter to the Post-Gazette appeared in my email in-box with an invitation to post it to the blog.
I don't know whether the facts it recounts are accurate. Even if the facts are accurate, I don't agree that reducing the size of the Mt. Lebanon Police Department by a single officer will negatively impact public safety, and I don't agree that the Commission doesn't care about public safety. Comments?
I don't know whether the facts it recounts are accurate. Even if the facts are accurate, I don't agree that reducing the size of the Mt. Lebanon Police Department by a single officer will negatively impact public safety, and I don't agree that the Commission doesn't care about public safety. Comments?
At Monday nights Commissioners Meeting in Mt. Lebanon, Commissioner Humphries directed that one Mt. Lebanon Police Officer be immediately laid off in an attempt to balance the budget for 2006. This action was not on the agenda and quite frankly the Municipal Manager & Police Administration were not even aware of the subject prior to the meeting.
As a resident of Mt. Lebanon, I am completely outraged that our Commissioners would for the first time in Mt. Lebanon history, remove an officer from employment to balance the budget and do so without prior discussions with the Management of this community. I find it completely incomprehensible for these Commissioners to hire the officer last year and spend in excess of 100 thousand dollars of municipal money for his training and equipment in the last 12 months and then arbitrarily lay him off. This is gross mismanagement of municipal funds.
I cannot determine the actions of this Commission to be appropriate with Public Safety when we have had such an influx of heroin and other drugs into the South Hills in the past year. I also find it very disillusioning that the Mt. Lebanon Police Department will have to remove one of it's Crime Prevention officers from our schools in order to replace the manpower depleted by this layoff. It is clearly evident that our Commissioners do not care about the safety prevention education of our children by reducing the size of our Police Department. It is outrageous that our Commissioners allocate thousands of dollars for flowers to be planted at our traffic islands and hundreds of thousands of dollars for new tee boxes at our golf course yet diminish the safety of our residents , especially the children, by their total lack of regard in Public Safety!
4 Comments:
The letter was signed, as was the email (though by a different person). Since it looks to me like the issue is a legitimate one (even though I tend to disagree on the merits), I didn't think it important to disclose the identities of the authors. If they see the blog and want to identify themselves, that's fine with me. If the P-G prints the letter, you will see the name of the letter writer in any case.
If money's what they're after, they could always sell off the MLPD action SWAT Hummer mobile police platform. Apart from the thousands it's worth, it will save the township the $427 it takes to fill it up once a year and drive it in the Halloween parade!
Matt:
Sorry...but you're wrong about the SRT vehicle that the police has. A few points:
1. It is used much more than you think -- not just in parades as you allude to. There have been many calls that the vehicle has been used in.
2. The vehicle is not worth "thousands" either. It actually has over 200,000 miles on it and was sold to the police department by an armored car company for $1. Yes, that's right. One Dollar! In fact, any repairs or upgrades to the vehicle were done "in-house" -- saving the municipality a lot of money.
I just thought that you (and the other people reading this post) might want to know the facts about the SRT vehicle.
I also wanted to comment on the proposed layoff of a crime prevention officer as part of the new budget.
It was proposed that it be a crime prevention officer to be layed off, but department policy states that if a layoff is to occur, it must start with the person with the least seniority. Here's a clip from a recent Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article discussing this exact point:
"At a budget workshop Nov. 29, commissioners came up with the idea of laying off a crime prevention officer from the police department at a savings of $112,000. But if a layoff occurs in the police department, it must be the officer with the least seniority. The department has 44 fulltime officers.
Chief Thomas Ogden said he had notified the department's most recently hired officer, who has been with the department for about 15 months, that he is likely to be laid off as of Dec. 31. But because he is newly hired, the savings from the layoff will be about $88,000, Mr. Humphreys and Mr. Feller said."
This is from the following article:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05342/618699.stm
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