Too Many Chiefs?
Posted byChris Thompson - 02.16.2011
Partners in Advance Northeast Ohio support efforts to make our region's local government more efficient and more collaborative. Achieving that goal requires us to look closely at how our government dollars are spent. A few years ago several Advance Northeast Ohio partners commissioned the Cost of Local Government research, which generated these reports, to get a better understanding of what local governments spend their money on.
More current local government spending is now also available on a national web site call Govistics, which shows that Northeast Ohio governments spend just over $1 billion a year in police services. Recently the Akron Beacon Journal took a closer look at one piece of that expense pie -- the cost of police chiefs. the story found pay for chiefs ranged widely and for no apparent reasons. That story prompted the editorial writers to ask whether there might be too many chiefs.
They wrote: "Across the region, townships, villages and small municipalities cling to their departments, each with its own chief...Without a more ratinal structure, the choices ahead are difficult, involving cutting police services or forcing voters to sort through many levy requests, each one competing for scare tax dollars."
Is the time right for communities in Northeast Ohio to rethink how we organize our public safety forces?
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