STOCKTON – Stockton’s mayor and city council are expected to vote Wednesday evening on the budget for the upcoming fiscal year. If approved, the money will go to the departments starting July 1.
City Manager Harry Black believes this is a balanced budget for the city, but some community members want to see more money put into public safety.
“I’ve lived here 35 years,” Stockton resident Eric Mieglitz said. “The crime rate is up.”
Mieglitz has lived in Stockton since the 1980s and said he has seen police officers come and go in the city.
“The quality, because of what’s happening here, has dropped dramatically,” he said. “The shortage of police officers, they just don’t have enough police officers.”
Mieglitz wants to see a change in this upcoming budget for the city.
“Either we raise the pay scale to get people to come here, because what they pay now, no one will come anymore,” he said.
Black said that’s exactly what the city is doing.
“We’ve made police competitive in terms of compensation,” Black said.
The city has enough money for 480 police officers, but has not been able to hire that many, according to Black.
“Based on projections, we’ll probably never get to 480,” he said.
So now the city has lowered its hiring goal to a more reasonable target of 425, using the money intended for the 480 officers to increase the salaries of the 425 approved positions.
“We reprogrammed those dollars into the 425,” Black said. “Recruitment incentives, recruitment incentives, so essentially they make more money.”
The Stockton Police Officers’ Association even admitted in a statement to CBS13:
“The reality is that Stockton police and the majority of agencies in this state will not reach their pre-2020 numbers anytime soon. There simply aren’t enough candidates to fill these spots.”
For people like Meiglitz, the new officers can’t come soon enough.
“I feel sorry for those who do work,” he said. ‘They work their butts off. They need help.’
Black said they already expect more officers to come to the city soon – possibly 30 more by the end of the year.
“Our application pool has tripled and quadrupled in terms of applications,” he said.
Meiglitz wants the pay to be higher than other nearby cities so they can retain those new officers.
“The pay scale better be higher than everyone else’s, and it isn’t,” he said.
The city is spending $43 million more this year than last year, and Black said that’s in large part because insurance premiums have increased.
