It is well past time for Aurora City Council members to show some leadership and get rid of police staffing mandates that have slowly strangled the city’s budget.
The latest compromise, a complex deal that merely puts off the problem, isn’t going to cut it.
It is a thinly disguised capitulation to the city’s influential police union that would replace one mandate with another.
Enough already.
At issue is Aurora’s police staffing mandate of two officers for every 1,000 citizens, which was approved by voters in 1993 along with a 0.25 percent sales tax that was supposed to pay for the additional staffing.
Trouble is, the extra sales tax has not kept pace with the cost of the additional staffing. And that has meant severe and ongoing cuts to other city services, such as libraries, recreation programs and road repair.
The council had decided last week to ask voters to either abolish the mandate or approve a tax to pay for it.
Though council members have always had the power to abolish the mandate themselves, we thought the vote was an acceptable course of action that would put an end — one way or another — to an untenable budget situation in the state’s third- largest city.
Then, in a bizarre turn of events, the council went into an emergency executive session Friday night — which is unusual, to say the least — and came out with a different plan.
The council decided it would offer the city’s police union a complicated deal that reduces the police staffing mandate to 1.6 officers per 1,000 residents for the next decade, with the provision that the number of officers would never go below the current level of 658.
After a decade, the mandate would increase to 1.9 per 1,000 officers. And officers would get a one-time bonus of $1,000 in 2012 or 2013.
The police union has until 5 p.m. today to accept the deal.
We think the council ought to withdraw it, and fast.
Heretofore, the council had been so concerned with the will of the voters that it had been unwilling to abolish the two-per-1,000 mandate on its own, something it could have done.
Now the council is going to reduce the mandate, then raise it and layer other goodies on it — such as the $1,000 bonuses — without going to voters?
Such a move makes sense only if the end game is to placate the police union.
Of all the scenarios contemplated in addressing the mandate, this is the most indefensible yet.
The city ought to proceed with its prior plan to go to voters, regardless of the police threats to litigate the ballot question.
So long as voters have a shot at this question — meaning it’s not removed from the ballot because of legal challenges — council members should get the message loud and clear.
The time has come for Aurora to increase taxes or get rid of the police staffing mandate so the city is no longer forced into increasingly unpalatable budget decisions.
