Join us for a Talkabout on Public Safety that will take place on Wednesday evening April 24th beginning at 7:00 PM at Rocky Vista University. The panel will include Fire Chief Andrew Parker and Police Chief Bob Flowers with members of their staff.
This forum will provide an opportunity to learn where we stand with our current levels of service for Police, Fire, and EMS, and to ask questions. If you are unable to attend, you may participate via Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89056016329
Here is what the Mayor wrote about Public Safety in the April 2024 Ivins City Newsletter.
The primary responsibility of the City is to insure the health, safety and welfare of its residents. Public Safety consumes the majority of our annual budget and rightly so. Our Police Officers, Firefighters, EMTs and Paramedics are the front line of defense against threats to anyone in our community so it is crucial that those departments are adequately staffed with committed, well trained and well equipped personnel.
We’re fortunate that is the case with both the Santa Clara/Ivins (SCI) Police Department managed by Ivins City and Santa Clara/Ivins (SCI) Fire and EMS Services managed by the City of Santa Clara.
There are national recommended standards for everything having to do with public safety. These recommendations are rarely fully met by any jurisdiction, however, due to the cost of providing the level of service they prescribe.
For example, to meet the federal standard of one police officer per thousand residents we would be required to increase our force by half again and drastically increase our budget as a result. Conditions in our two communities simply do not warrant that number of officers to achieve the high level of service we’re accustomed to so we consciously do not follow that standard.
The same is true for staffing and equipment standards for fire and EMS services. But because there is always more that can be done to bolster either department, we two cities have been compelled to define and agree upon what constitutes acceptable levels of service based on our annual call volumes and their types to hold costs at a level we can afford.
Market forces have driven salaries and equipment costs up considerably over the last few years leaving ours and other cities scrambling to effectively provide these services. Add to that increased training requirements, mandated equipment upgrades and needed facility improvements and we have a situation that is very difficult to manage.
Unlike other city services where fees are raised to compensate for increasing costs, public safety services for the most part are not billed. They are funded primarily through the general fund. When needs in those areas exceed budget capacities cities are left with the unsavory options of either increasing taxes or reducing services in other areas.
Both Ivins and Santa Clara have been wrestling with these problems over the last few budget cycles and are facing them once again in current budget discussions. Cooperatively we have landed on tentative level of service agreements and have budget numbers in hand reflecting them that appear to be manageable.
But the Inter-local Agreements that bind us together have been called into question by both sides so a specialized study will be commissioned this year to provide added substance to our future discussions concerning them. For the time being we will continue under the existing agreements in the hopes that our differences of opinion can be reconciled.