Mayor Justin Bibb is pledging Cleveland will do all it can to hire police officers and home inspectors, as the city deals with violent crime and decaying neighborhoods.
Bibb presented City Council with his $2 billion annual budget proposal on Tuesday morning. The latest spending plan eliminates 148 vacant police force jobs that the mayor termed “ghost vacancies,” positions the city has struggled for years to fill.
Those cuts enabled the city to give police a pay raise meant to help recruitment, he said. Even so, council members pressed Bibb to fill the vacant jobs that riddle the budget, especially the more than 180 empty police officer positions on a force of 1,350.
“I am holding everybody in my administration, in public safety, HR, and civil service accountable in terms of police staffing,” Bibb replied to council. “I want to exceed the number. That’s my goal. Hopefully we get there. But I’m throwing the entire kitchen sink at this issue.”
Reducing vacant positions helped Bibb balance revenues and expenses across the $778.7 million General Fund budget. This proposal includes a cut in vacant housing code enforcement jobs, even though the administration is embarking on its “Residents First” housing code initiative this year.
Bibb said his administration wrote the budget thinking that council might not pass the Residents First legislation. But the mayor said he had promised Building and Housing Director Sally Martin O’Toole that she would have the resources she needed to carry out her plans.
This budget includes a new “vacancy pool” of uncommitted money that departments can draw from to supplement their staffing. The administration estimates that the pool can fund 125 jobs.
Some council members said city neighborhoods were beset by violent crime and needed more police. The violence touched Kevin Bishop of Ward 2 personally. He recounted that someone shot out one of his downstairs windows over the last few days.
Ward 10 Council Member Anthony Hairston, who represents parts of Glenville and Collinwood, urged Bibb not to touch vacancies in police and building inspection.
“If our communities aren’t safe, and they are not inhabitable, then we don’t have neighborhoods,” Hairston said. “We don’t have a city. We don’t have a place where people want to live or people want to come.”
The other Collinwood council member, Ward 8’s Michael Polensek, painted the problem in near-apocalyptic terms.
“I don’t always agree with you, but you might be our last hope to stabilize the city and specifically the East Side neighborhoods,” he said. “I’m being very blunt about that.”