Fine revenue loss stings, but won’t hurt RCMP service delivery

“Absolutely not,” he says. “The City of Red Deer has authorized a strength of 174 police officers and they are maintaining that. The lack of revenue doesn’t affect the way we do the job, but everyone in Red Deer as taxpayers has to somehow make up that loss.”

Noted repeatedly on Friday is that the loss of fine revenue pushes the property tax increase up 0.75 per cent, no matter what city council does otherwise to reduce it.

“We recognize that if the province needs to review the program, that’s fine, but it is incongruent however for them to take more revenue while they have expressed concern for municipalities about the same point,” says Mayor Tara Veer. “We fully expect that in the next quarter, a report will be coming to council for us to decide whether or not we’ll be continuing with it.”

Superintendent Grobmeier also pointed out that while Operating Budget 2020 does not provide for new officers, funding for new members in 2020 was added last year, including for one downtown member and two community peace officer positions.

Another noted negative is that the provincial grant the City receives for policing cannot be stretched as it once was. It originally funded three officers, but hasn’t increased with the rising cost of an RCMP member; now approximately $150,000.

Grobmeier, responding to comments from Councillor Dianne Wyntjes, also touched on the growing societal call for harsher sentencing, particularly for repeat offenders.

“It’s not a secret that we have a lot of people out there that are awaiting trial and then back on the street, or of they get a sentence and it’s very short. There certainly is frustration in the public,” he says, insisting though that any internal frustration doesn’t impact how members do their job.

“Simply incarcerating people isn’t always the answer. If it was, the United States would have the best crime rate in the world. There is a balance between incarcerating people and also giving them the proper tools to change.” Council committed to further advocacy on the matter.

Elsewhere in the policing budget is just over $160,000, the RCMP’s portion of $397,000 approved for the clean-up of rough sleeper camps and needle debris.

Social Planning Supervisor Ryan Veldkamp says 2019 brought with it one challenge in particular in dealing with the encampments: the volume.

“We saw the number of reports go up to 518 as of the end of October 2019. We had 513 for the total of 2018,” he says. “We also saw quite a drastic increase in the number of camps that the Parks team actually cleaned up; they’d responded to 375 clean-ups by the end of October, whereas there was 243 total in 2018.”

They also recorded meeting 105 different people in those camps last year, he says, though it’s too early to draw a correlation to the number of homeless people currently in Red Deer.

The last Point in Time Homeless Count, which found there 144 people without a roof over their head, was conducted in 2018. Another count is being organized for this April. Veldkamp adds that while the number of camps is up, the strategy has been successful in terms of having a greater focus on housing the people they encounter. In 2019, clean-up encounters led directly to finding homes for 30 people.

2020 Operating Budget debate is set to conclude Monday, starting between 2 and 2:30 at City Hall.

Find more budget coverage in our Red Deer section Friday night and over the weekend.

by Josh Hall (Twitter: @Vancan19)

Fine revenue loss stings, but won’t hurt RCMP service delivery

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