Scare Tactics

Public Safety Commissioner Ron Kim would rather gnaw his own foot off at the ankle and then use the dismembered limb as a gavel at the bargaining table than come up with a cogent plan to reduce costs in his department. Or at least he’d like city tax payers to think that’s his attitude toward the $1.3 million worth of cuts he’s been asked to make in the Spa City’s police and fire budgets.

Kim’s posturing in wake of the proposed budget cuts has been no less dramatic than if he were performing the aforementioned self-inflicted amputation. He told an audience choked with firefighters and police officers that the budget cuts would force him to hand out pink slips like they were Broadway parking tickets during peak race season. In the commissioner’s estimation, he would need to lay off 14 firefighters and 19 cops in order to meet a requested 6.8 percent reduction in 2009 spending.

“If we don’t work together, I believe this city will regret taking this kind of step,” he said Wednesday.

People will wait hours for a cop or firefighter, according to Kim. And that’s only if someone is there to dispatch the call. Kids in school will start snorting coke and pounding vodka smoothies on the playground, because there won’t be anyone there to tell them it’s wrong. Those school children not geeked on hard drugs will assuredly fall prey to the hurtling automobiles, because there will be no crossing guards to help them traverse the mean city streets.

Overweight tandem tractor trailer trucks will charge down Broadway leaving chunks of uprooted pavement in their wake. Surely, they’ll cause traffic snarls during track season, because there will be no cops to guide the ebb and flow of racing congestion. Malicious criminals will flock to Saratoga from the oppressive, over-policed cities of Albany and Schenectady because there will be no police patrols to stop them. Bleak and hopeless, fire and brimstone; famine, plague and pestilence. The horror. The horror.

But this is all a gigantic scare tactic Kim is using to achieve the end game for his department, which is to forestall any cuts to the budget in the hope an economic turnaround will come to the rescue. Anyone who has dealt with the commish during his nearly four years in office will understand he has a flare for the dramatic and really doesn’t mind making a jack ass out of himself in public if there’s a slight chance he can pander to his constituents. These constituents happen to be the police and fire union leaders and the chiefs that have persistently and successively failed to curb out-of-control spending in their departments.

The worse of the two are the Saratoga Springs Police under Chief Ed Moore, who has spent money like it were being printed with a seized counterfeiting machine in one of his department’s jail cells. His department is the largest annual expense incurred by the city. And each year, this expense seems to rise.

The union-beholden Kim is always the defender of the police budget each year, and will even trot Moore in front of the public to bemoan a lack of personnel or how the overtime costs are simply out of their control. This repetitive process plays out like clockwork every year there is a budget crunch. But for two years under Mayor Valerie Keehn, there was no crunch; nor was there much of one when the Johnson Administration first took office.

The reasons for this were threefold. First, the city council always had the state’s VLT aid to plunder each year. Secondly, there was the fund balance to raid with the VLT money didn’t come through. And lastly, there were the unions to handle; among them, the omnipotent and all-powerful police union.

Now push has come to shove. The city’s coffers are empty. The state aid is gone and will never return. Yet the city’s police union is still barking as though it had the leverage to make demands. The saber rattling reached a feverish pitch Wednesday, when union head Ed Lewis brazenly likened the police force to a burgeoning business.

“When a corporation looks at cuts it’s because of a lack of business,” he blurted out in a moment of unfettered stupidity.

Well Ed, if the city police were a corporation, the CEO would have been fired long ago for mismanagement of assets and burgeoning overtime costs. Or this executive’s failure to uphold workplace standards set by the U.S. Department of Labor, resulting in a federal lawsuit successfully being lodged against the aforementioned corporation. But why go there?

The police also trotted out wounded Officer Adam Baker as a tangible example of what will happen if the public safety department is forced to cut $1.3 million. Some of the less fickle residents of the Spa City may recall the police chief flippantly using Baker as the exclamation point on his push to restore cuts to police overtime in October.

At the time, Moore suggested Baker might not even be alive today were it not for a veritable cadre of police ready to spring into action –and make lots of overtime –when his jugular was nicked by a troubled Four Winds patient wielding a box-cutter. Now he’s expecting residents to believe Baker’s job will be part of the aforementioned cuts?

But admittedly, the police brass and union leadership don’t honestly think any of their fear mongering will ever come to pass. They even admitted as much during their dog and pony show, which has been ongoing since Kim and Lewis flashed their mugs before the hopelessly fickle television media before the Memorial Day weekend.

“This is more political, this whole thing,” Lewis admitted to the Daily Gazette. “It’s more of a poker game that is going on between these commissioners.”

And one that is taking place at the behest of honest taxpayers who are simply trying to figure out whether they’re going to need to buy a hand-held howitzer to defend themselves against the masses or if they should simply take out a fourth mortgage to make next year’s city tax payment. Bravo, gentlemen. Way to uphold your duty as sworn elected officials.

Kim’s solution to all of this is to liquidate the city’s assets and stamp parking meters on every corner like Albany Mayor Jerry “The Tan” Jennings did in Albany. But truth be known, one-time increases in revenue won’t solve this problem. In fact, one-time revenue boosts were exactly what got the council into the mess that it’s in now.

Even sustained revenue streams like paid parking won’t solve this budget crisis. And Kim’s ridiculous posturing certainly won’t fix the problem. What it will do is curry him favor among the less cognizant residents that are likely to wage a witch hunt against any commissioner complicit in the budget crisis. His blathering is a way to place the onus on Finance Commissioner Ken Ivins, who does bear some responsibility in this crisis, but only for not playing hardball with Kim last year, when it was blisteringly apparent the Public Safety Department’s budget was the most bloated of them all.