St. Louis Set to Evaluate Public Safety

ST. LOUIS -- In the face of rising public safety costs and a shrinking population, city leaders are set to evaluate the workload, response times, and staffing of city police officers, firefighters and emergency medical workers.

Mayor Francis Slay and his top advisers envision a time when the city rethinks public safety staffing, combines dispatch, builds new cross-department "superstations," and spends less tax dollars for better services.

Eddie Roth, Slay's public safety director, will publicly present the idea for the first time tomorrow, at a meeting of the board of police commissioners, on which Slay sits.

Slay and Roth propose the city hire a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, the International City/County Management Association, to spend 160 days digging into police, fire and emergency medical service operations, staffing and equipment. The group estimates such a study would cost about $270,000.

Slay, in a letter to police board President Richard Gray, said has already begun asking businesses for donations to fund it. The "rising cost of public employee pensions, demographic changes in our City, and modern technology are forcing the city to rethink how it delivers services," Slay wrote to Gray.

The move comes as Slay continues to fight to rein in the rising cost of the firefighter's retirement system, and gain mayoral control of the police department, which has long been run by state-appointed board members.

In November, voters will decide via a statewide ballot initiative whether to return police governance to the city. This week, city aldermen will again hear arguments concerning two bills written by Slay's attorneys which would disband the Firemen's Retirement System of St. Louis and restart a new firefighter pension system with markedly lower benefits.

Fire union President Chris Molitor did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

Police union President Sgt. David Bonenberger said he hadn't heard of the proposal. Efficiency studies make sense for administrators, he said, and he hoped this one might shed light on how Slay would run the department if voters pass the November ballot initiative.

But the proposal is apt to make officers nervous, he said. "A lot of times, the biggest critics of law enforcement aren't in law enforcement," he said. "I just hope they're able to look at it from an objective point of view."

Roth says it is an exciting opportunity for the city. Police Chief Dan Isom and Fire Chief Dennis Jenkerson recently said evaluations of their departments are past due, and committed to working together.

This past winter, the city got four proposals from outside agencies to study city public safety services. Roth said the D.C. nonprofit's was the best.

The organization is staffed by city, fire, police and EMS professionals, he said, with years of experience and an understanding of the best work being done in the country.

The proposal describes a study that is in-depth and invasive, tracking staffers, calls for service, response times, length of time spent on calls, and even downtime -- "non-value added activities."

The nonprofit will evaluate equipment, analyze the use of civilian employees instead of sworn officers, determine the effectiveness of staff, and estimate manpower requirements, according to the proposal.

Roth said he would like the nonprofit to start in July, and finish by the end of the calendar year.

He said he has asked former Metro chief and police board president Bob Baer to be a special advisor on the process.

He also said that Richard Rosenfeld, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri -- St. Louis and former president of the American Society of Criminology, will temporarily move to City Hall to work on partnership projects, including this one.

Roth cautioned that the study's results will not necessarily mean smaller police and fire departments. Still, he said, Jenkerson and Isom are ready to streamline operations.

"I think both chiefs have an appetite for making hard decisions," he said. "They've had to do it already. And they've had to do it on the fly. What I'm saying is, let's sit down and really have a road map for how these things look over the (next) five years."

This will leave the city more prepared for the future, he said.

Even if it doesn't regain control of the police department, and fails to curtail pension costs.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service