PAYING FOR POLICE
It was entirely predictable: When the county budget was
approved last week, it was by a 17-12 margin — the ratio of Republicans to Democrats in the CountyLegislature.
Still, the meeting wasn’t entirely devoid of interest.
Democrats proposed four amendments, which were either voted
down or declared out of order. Mostly they dealt with fairly minor policy
changes and would’ve redirected (relatively) small amounts of money —
$100,000 in a budget of more than a billion.
But one amendment proposed a substantial policy change, one
that would have reordered the way a major government service is paid for in MonroeCounty and, possibly, how it’s
delivered.
The amendment was to create county police districts, then
charge residents in each district for their use of the Sheriff’s Road Patrol.
Several towns in the county have no police force and often
rely on the Road Patrol as their primary form of police protection.
Legislator Ted O’Brien, who proposed the Democrats’ amendment,
said the plan would save the county more than $20 million, by charging towns
and municipalities for their use of the Road Patrol. The Democrats have
complained for a long time about the inequities of a system that everyone in
the county pays for, but that some use more heavily than others.
The City of Rochester,
for example, and the Town of Irondequoit,
which O’Brien represents, have their own police force. Those forces are the
first line of defense for residents, and sheriff’s deputies are called in only for
backup or for special services. A town might need a specialized team that it doesn’t
have, for instance: a SWAT team, SCUBA divers, or hostage negotiators.
Democrats, who represent the city and the suburbs of Irondequoit
and Brighton (which have their own police forces), complain
that their constituents’ taxes subsidize the public safety of towns like
Mendon, Pittsford, and Riga (which
don’t have police forces).
If the county established police districts, the Democrats
said, it could bill towns according to how much they use the Road Patrol.
The Democrats included this proposal in their package of
budget ideas earlier this year. But up until last week’s legislature meeting,
public debate on a police district had taken place around the edges, at press
conferences and in newspaper and television sound bites.
At the legislature meeting, Democrats may well have wished
they hadn’t brought the subject up.
Majority Leader Bill Smith ripped into the proposal,
claiming it was “probably the most dishonest proposal” he’d seen in his 12
years in the legislature and suggesting that the Democrats’ endgame was a
centralized, metropolitan police force.
An impassioned Smith was prepared for this particular debate
with stats and arguments. (“I’ve been waiting for months to give this speech,”
he admitted after colleagues noted his enthusiasm.) He opposed the plan, he
said, not because it would mean additional taxes for his Pittsford
constituents, who rely on the Road Patrol, but because it would jeopardize the
police force of his constituents in East Rochester.
Small local departments depend on heavily on the Road Patrol.
The Democrats’ proposal “would drive them out of business,” he said.
Smith read off the number of times the Road Patrol responded
to calls for service last year from municipalities with their own police departments:
6,344 in Brighton, 48,394 in Rochester,
4,662 in Gates, 1,367 in Irondequoit.
One-third of the calls that the Road Patrol responded to that year were in the
city and in towns with their own forces, he said.
“That actually represents, in my opinion, the least amount
of support the town police forces get from the sheriff’s department,” Smith
told City Newspaper in a subsequent interview.
At the meeting, he enumerated some of the additional support.
Because they can call for sheriff’s deputies for backup, many of the smaller
towns don’t have to maintain as large a police force as they’d otherwise have
to. They don’t have to maintain costly units like SWAT teams and canine units.
And they receive free training from the sheriff’s department.
If all of those suddenly came with a price tag attached, Smith
said in the interview, “this would price the cost of police departments out of
the reach of the towns that want them.”
The Democrats’ proposal deals only with Road Patrol
services, however, not with things like training and the use of special units. But
Smith argued at the legislature meeting that it’s not always practical to
separate one service from another. In response to Smith’s questions, Undersheriff
Daniel Greene told the legislature that 174 of the 196 deputies assigned to the
Road Patrol also serve in special units.
The complexity of the issue caused one Democrat to bail.
Assistant Minority Leader Harry Bronson joined Republicans
in voting against the proposal. After the vote, he said he wanted more time to
consider the plan.
— Krestia DeGeorge
URBAN TRAIL GETS GRANT
One major link in the region’s trail system just got a lot
closer to reality.
On Monday, Mayor Bob Duffy announced $2.2 million in grants
to build a trail in a former railway right-of-way in northeast Rochester.
The trail runs southward from SenecaPark
to a point on St. Paul Street south
of Clifford Avenue. Plans
for it have been in the works for a while (see “Rail to Trail,” March 15). But
there’ve been plenty of obstacles, not the least of which is money to build it.
That money has now materialized, mainly in the form of a $2
million federal transportation grant. New YorkState and Kodak also pitched in,
with $50,000 and $150,000, respectively. And the city is ponying up $395,000 to
buy the land from CSX, which has owned the right-of-way.
The trail will provide green space and a recreation
opportunity in an area of the city with less access to parkland than many
neighborhoods. And with recent improvements to trails in the lower Genesee
Gorge and a planned connection across the river at the MiddleFalls, people will be able to
travel nearly all the way through the city on trails — and connect with a
larger trail network that includes the Erie Canal Trailway and the Genesee
Valley Greenway.
— Krestia DeGeorge
BORROWING APPROVED FOR WATER PLANT
The budget may have dominated last week’s CountyLegislature meeting, but there was
one other important bit of action.
The CountyLegislature
gave the Monroe County Water Authority its go-ahead to borrow money for a
proposed eastside water treatment plant. The plant has already sparked
controversy, most recently at a public hearing held by the state Department of
Environmental Conservation (see “Water Plant Wars,” December 6).
For a capital project like this one, the Water Authority can
borrow money one of two ways. The county can borrow the money on the
authority’s behalf. Or the authority can issue its own bonds; it just needs to
get the CountyLegislature’s
consent first.
It makes a certain amount of sense for the county and Water
Authority to take the latter course. As Deputy County Executive James Smith (a
former Water Authority executive director) told the legislature, the
authority’s bond rating is better than the county’s. That means it can borrow
money at a lower rate than the county can.
What Smith didn’t say was that it takes only a simple
majority for the legislature to give its consent for the authority’s bonding.
For the county to borrow the money would require approval by two-thirds of the
legislators. That would mean at least three Democrats would have to be on
board, and Democrats have been critical of the eastside project.
The controversy over the proposal wasn’t eased any by the
fact that it was introduced as a “matter of urgency.” Matters of urgency are
designed to give the county executive some flexibility to get legislation
passed in a hurry when a situation calls for it. But that bypasses the
committee process, where legislators hammer out policy. It thereby bypasses
much of the public scrutiny that most legislative proposals get.
And on this particular project, the Water Authority has
agreed to delay construction for 18 months while the city and county negotiate
a new water-sharing agreement. That made the Brooks administration’s rush with
the funding proposal doubly puzzling.
Minority Leader Carla Palumbo raised that issue, saying she
was “concerned and surprised.”
Smith’s response failed to address the question.
“Passage of this does not change that agreement,” he said.
But that doesn’t address why there was so much urgency that
the proposal had to bypass the committee process.
Smith’s tautological response: “This would be the
appropriate time to give consent.”
The Democrats’ attempt to table the proposal was defeated,
and the legislature voted, along party lines, to let the authority borrow the
money for the plant.
— Krestia DeGeorge
Clare Regan
Not long after it was founded, the Judicial Process
Commission found itself lacking an editor for Justicia, its newsletter.
The JPC’s Ginny Mackey asked Clare Regan, ‘Would you take it
one for two or three weeks?'” recalls Gordon Webster, a minister at Rochester’s
Downtown United Presbyterian Church.
Regan, who died last week, edited the journal for three
decades.
“I would love it if someone else were to take over, but
there isn’t anyone else,” she told this newspaper in a 2002 profile.
That’s the kind of anecdote that Regan’s friends and
colleagues tell about her, the kind that points up both her intense energy in
service to many causes and her ability to adapt in order to accomplish what she
needed to.
And over the years, there were plenty of accomplishments.
She helped found Catholics Against Nuclear Arms. She managed the first campaign
for CountyLegislature
for a then-novice politician, Louise Slaughter. In particular, she made a name
for herself as an advocate for a better, more proactive justice system,
including alternatives to incarceration and an end to the death penalty.
“When the Attica riots happened, that
really started her interest in the criminal-justice system,” says Bob Regan,
the youngest of her six children.
What set Regan apart from other passionate activists was the
extent and specificity of knowledge she brought to her work. Perhaps that had
something to do with the discipline she honed as a graduate student in
chemistry. Regan had a master’s degree in the field and was pursuing a PhD when
she stopped to raise a family. Instead, she turned her scientifically-trained
mind toward the cause of justice.
“She inspired many of us around her with the detailed
knowledge she had of many cases,” says Webster.
Regan also took up the challenge of imparting that knowledge
to others.
“I could always count on a line forming outside my office
when she taught,” says John Klofas, head of RIT’s criminal-justice department,
where Regan taught. Klofas’s students include future cops, and Regan challenged
many of them with her liberal ideas. At first, they complained to him, says
Klofas. But by the end of a semester with her, even though they may not have
agreed with her, most students found her classes valuable.
“It was great to have a balance,” he says.
Even while providing balance to RIT students, Regan was able
to find it in her own life, devoting herself to her children as fully as to her
work.
“I’d meet people and they’d be like, ‘Oh, you’re Clare
Regan’s kid?'” recalls Bob Regan. “It was always a shock to them that she
raised six kids” on top of everything else she did. But for Bob and his
siblings, it was just the opposite: They barely realized they had such a
prolific activist for a mother because of the time and attention she lavished
on them.
The way Regan lived her life may have sprung from her own
religious faith (“She really understood the theological basis for justice,”
says Webster), but it grew to encompass a truly catholic — that is, universal
— vision of justice.
“We’re all very, very grateful for her witness and for her
friendship,” says Webster.
— Krestia DeGeorge
This article appears in Dec 20-26, 2006.
