Residents may voice their concerns regarding the City Manager’s effort to deny prioritized funding to law enforcement by emailing Mayor Skip Henderson directly at SkipHenderson@columbusga.org, while cc’ing their respective city council members on the email.
COLUMBUS, Ga. — City councilors recently voted to provide much-needed funding for our city’s law enforcement and judicial system to prioritize fighting our city’s outrageously-dangerous crime rates.
City manager Isaiah Hugley, however, made it clear he absolutely did not want to make that a priority.
Instead, Hugley wanted to have his cake and eat it too by keeping the rest of the budget proposal intact without having to find the additional funds needed to secure the physical safety of the city against violent repeat-offenders and criminal gangs.
Hugley, who is ironically responsible for not including the much-needed funding in the budget proposal in the first place, chose instead to scold council members for having to pull the much-needed funding from the city’s well-funded reserves — even though Hugley himself is the one who failed to include the funding in the budget in the first place.
In response, several city councilors spoke up to put Hugley in his place — and some of them really didn’t hold back at all.
THE REQUESTS
During the recent meeting of the Budget Review Committee, councilors voted on many items to be added to the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins on July 1.
Almost all of those items were requests from law enforcement-centric departments that directly deal with the investigation, arrest, prosecution, sentencing, and jailing of the criminals who terrorize our community.
Some of those funding requests included:
THE ‘CONTROVERSY’
All of those above-listed funding requests work hand-in-glove to investigate, arrest, prosecute, try, sentence, and jail the criminals who terrorize our city.
All of those funding needs didn’t just miraculously materialize overnight. If Hugley was unaware of the needs, then he wasn’t doing his job in the first place.
Nonetheless, Hugley failed to include them in the budget proposal, which forced the departments to request that the funding be placed on the coveted “Add/Delete List,” which allows the departments to formally make the request to city council members themselves without Hugley’s interference.
Councilors of the Budget Review Committee then ultimately vote to approve or deny the funding requests, including the identification of where the funds will come from.
If there is no place from which to pull the funds, then the money comes out of the city’s reserve funding.
Charmaine Crabb (District 5) had the following to say in response to Hugley’s two-faced antics:
“We need some more personnel in certain areas. I mean, we are trying desperately to deal with the crime issue here. And so you know — these law enforcement departments, the justice departments — there is no way we're going to get a handle on the crime in this city without putting funds and boots on the ground to take care of this issue … and when we get those extra positions, then they're going to be doing their job and they're going to be bringing more criminals into the justice system — and they're not going to have the staff and they're not going to have the personnel to handle the the extra. I mean, it all works together, you know, and if we don't lift them all up, then it's going to be frustrating for the police department — because they'll bring them in, but if they can't be prosecuted, they go back out onto the street.”
Glenn Davis (District 2) made a similar point, building off Crabb’s words before making a bold-yet-true statement against Hugley’s self-serving and ironic blame game:
“I think Councilor Crabb just made my case for me, but let me just say this: What I heard from the judicial branch is that every bit of this stuff is hand-in-glove. I mean, it's just — somebody correct me if I'm wrong — but we talked about a new judge, more court cases, running cases through: do we understand how much money the clerk of superior court collects and is responsible for? And if they're moving along — if they're running efficiently and collecting and those funds are coming in — I mean, I would take that chance of balancing the request with what they're capable of doing: a return on investment. I mean, I would really challenge that. That may be yet to be seen, but look: yeah, all the money we have is in the fund balance.”
Davis then went so far as to tell Hugley that he was happy to cut the money from Hugley’s own personal budget and use it to fund law enforcement instead if Hugley didn’t want council to allocate it from reserves:
“I mean, Mr. City Manager, I can cut your budget, I can go into risk management and pull some money out if you want me to. I mean, I know places to find some money, but, umm … my point is, if you don't want me to go into the fund balance, I mean, I can go somewhere else and find the money.”
Needless to say, Hugley was not happy about how quickly his incompetent little antics were quickly humbled by council’s reality check.
Several minutes later in the conversation, Councilor Walker Garrett (District 8) added the following:
“When I look through this list (of funding requests), my constituents’ number one issue is their safety and bringing businesses to Columbus. We can't do that without courts working — which means you have public defenders, you have DA's, and you have Superior Court. And I see requests from Recorder’sCourt — which a lot of that brings in funding when people get fined — and to be quite honest, I mean, if we don't maintain … our facilities to some degree, they will degrade … and eventually will cost us more to replace them … And I don't like it coming out of fund balance. We've added to it every year since I’ve been on council, we've added to the fund balance. But at this point, our city is a point of crisis. I mean we all realize that when it comes to safety — and some of these things are public safety and some of them aren't — but even some of the parks and rec type stuff, you know, just maintain the facilities that give kids a place to do things. So, we've built up significant reserves over the years … I certainly think most of these requests are very reasonable.”
Hugley remained silent on the matter for the remainder of the budget meeting after he was humbled by several councilors who put him in his place.
THE ROOT PROBLEM
Ask yourself: Why did Hugley not simply include this in the original budget that he himself is responsible for building? Why did he not already have these items in the budget in the first place? Why is he forcing the council to have to use reserve funding, and then yelling at them for having to do so?
The answer to these questions is as simple as it seems.
Money and accounting really isn’t complicated; it only appears to be when you begin to try and make it appear in two places at the same time.
If you’ll recall, the City of Columbus recently received over $80,000,000 from the American Rescue Plan in two batches of $40M each.
In usual aMaZiNg Columbus style, officials jumped at the opportunity to buy new stuff like it was Christmas morning instead of maximizing the effectiveness of the $80M funding to free up the rest of the upcoming budget around it.
Instead of allocating that funding in ways to best prepare the city for the future, city officials instead decided to act like kids in a candy store as they bought any-and-everything they desired; they bought new stuff instead of allocating the funding in ways that could have freed up other funds responsibly.
HUGLEY’S ARROGANCE
Now, Hugley is scolding city council for having to use reserve funding to get law enforcement and the courts the resources they need to combat the city’s third-world crime rate, even though he himself failed the city by allowing such a gross mismanagement of funds and monetary forethought in the first place.
Keep in mind that instead of Hugley offering to say he would do his job to structure the budget around the bare-bone physical security needs of the city, Hugley scolded council for being forced to use reserve funding to get law enforcement and the courts what they need.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Perhaps city officials should continue to remind the city manager that it was his own budget proposal that originally chose to not prioritize these funds in the first place.
Perhaps Hugley should start realizing that he can’t fund his little pet projects under-the-radar while simultaneously denying the freaking physical security of the entire city.
The crime isn’t going away on its own.
Start prioritizing it.
You can’t fund your cake and eat it too.
Residents may voice their concerns regarding the City Manager’s effort to deny prioritized funding to law enforcement by emailing Mayor Skip Henderson directly at SkipHenderson@columbusga.org, while cc’ing their respective city council members on the email.
Facts are stubborn things — and we’ll keep publishing them, whether city officials like them or not.
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