‘People don’t want to see this cut’: Durham police board resists request to chop proposed 20% from budget

It’s all wrapped up within a 9.75 per cent budget increase regional guideline as revealed by the finance department Sept. 12. Of that 9.75 per cent regional tax increase, the DRPS budget alone represents a 2.5 per cent increase, with 7.25 per cent of increases to come from other sources.

Members of the region’s finance committee passed an amendment asking finance staff to come back with options that would see the DRPS cut to a two per cent increase and the remainder of regional department budget increase requests for 2024 chopped to either 6.25 or 5.25 per cent in total.

At the Sept. 19 police services board meeting, cutting more than $4 million, or 20 per cent, from the 2024 budget increase request didn’t get much support.

“This is an essential service and people don’t want to see this cut,” said police services board chair Shaun Collier, who is also the mayor of Ajax.

He called the request to cut the budget from a 2.5 to two per cent overall impact on the region’s tax increase, “like throwing a dart at a dart board. I find that really troubling. If that’s the regional direction, that’s fine. We need to go back to them and say, this is what we need, this is our budget ask, these are the new officers to keep up with growth, these are the services we are not going to be able to provide, so you can make an educated, informed decision.

“In Ajax, we had a decade of feel-good budgets of one to two per cent, everybody’s happy, but guess what, it’s asking people to do more with less,” he said in arguing for the increase to remain at 9.7 per cent for the police budget.

DRPS figures show that hiring of both front-line and civilian employees remained flat from 2010 to 2018 but has risen slightly since then. The plan is to aggressively increase hiring through 2028 to keep up with regional population growth and to make up for some lost time.

“This is the first year of our multi-year plan to address some of those major pressures that the community and the organization are feeling. This is Step 1 of a multi-year plan. Now it exists and pressures are there,” said DRPS chief administrative officer Stan MacLellan.

Here’s what the DRPS says it needs:

• 76 new staff hired (including 25 new front-line officers).

• A $296-million capital projects program that will extend out to 2033 (largely paid for by reserves, development charges and grants).

• Increases to front-line and civilian staffing from 2023 to 2028 that will increase the size of the force from around 1,300 to about 1,500.

• The increase in 2024 is mostly made up of a salary and benefit increase totalling $12.1 million, making up 4.88 per cent of the 9.7 per cent increase.

• The rest of the increase is made up of additional operating expenses ($5.2 million) and new staff requested, plus support ($6.6 million).

When considered with the request that the DRPS will have to come back year after year with more requests for large increases to keep pace, some councillors raised concerns.

“This is going to be one of the most challenging three-year periods for this board. We’re going to have make sure that people understand this is absolutely necessary,” said Oshawa Mayor Dan Carter, a member of the police services board.

But DRPS Chief Peter Moreira, who was hired this past March, said it was important to have consistency in planning for the future.

“We have to have some predictability in how our staffing will grow,” he said.

“The stop-start and no predictability in every year; it adds stress to that process,” Moreira said.