Ketchikan Police Chief Jeff Walls asked the city council for a nearly 200% increase to the department’s budget for capital improvement projects. He’s requesting over $1.8 million to replace outdated infrastructure for both the police and fire departments. Walls said that if the city doesn’t act soon, some of these emergency response systems could fail.
The Ketchikan City Council called a special meeting in the last week of November to begin discussing the draft of the operating budget. The largest portion of that discussion centered on the Ketchikan Police Department.
In the city’s draft budget, the police department’s total funding increase was about 25%. Most of that is to cover higher insurance costs.
Ketchikan Police Chief Jeff Walls took the podium to ask for over $1.8 million more than that. There is a range of projects Walls said he needs funding for. The most expensive is building improvements, like a new HVAC system, which totals over $800,000. But Walls said the highest priority is upgrading the island’s 911 dispatch system.
“We have to have this upgrade for the 911 system. We’re at a critical state where this is going to fail,” Walls told the city council.
According to the police chief, Ketchikan’s emergency dispatch 911 system hasn’t been updated since 2012. He said when certain calls are made over the internet or phone, they are first routed to Canada and then back to dispatchers in Ketchikan. An upgrade to modernize that would cost $681,750.
At a local meeting in mid-November, Ketchikan Fire Chief Rick Hines said that these are an accumulation of years of piling costs and aging infrastructure.
“Let’s say I own a lawnmowing business,” Hines said. “Let’s say I cut your yard, right? One year, it’s $20. The next year I cut your yard and I charge you $22. Are you going to cut me out or be upset about it? No. But if I charge you 20 bucks for five years, and then on the sixth year, I start charging you 40 bucks, you’re gonna look for somebody else to cut your grass, right? The situation that we are in, in the city, is going to come to the point where when we really have to fix the infrastructure needs, we’re going to hit the taxpayers really hard.”
Hines explained that it’s not just that the costs have piled up, but that older equipment creates additional, unseen costs for the taxpayer. For instance, the department’s aging fleet of vehicles: “The frustrating thing for me is if I owned a vehicle at my house that was worth $5,000 and something broke on it, and the mechanic said it’s going to cost you $6,000 to fix it, what would a reasonable person do? We have vehicles in the city fleet that are maybe only worth $12,000. But because there’s no other option, they’re spending $20,000 a year to keep them on the road.”
Echoing these sentiments, Police Chief Walls asked the city council at the budget meeting for $300,000 to replace three cop cars. He said that they used to replace two cars every year but stopped in 2020 because of financial losses from the pandemic. They have three cars that are over a decade old, and Walls said they can’t handle being on the road for round-the-clock patrols.
“I told the chief that I am very unhappy with the dispatch system. What I’d like to see is a standalone dispatch center that serves the whole island and really not just something nestled in the police department but we’re just not there money-wise,” said City Manager Delilah Walsh, adding that this line-by-line city budget meeting was just the first step to get to where they need to be.
City council members made motions to cut the HVAC replacement out of the budget and reduce the new patrol cars from three to two. Both motions failed. Before moving on to other items in the budget, Ketchikan Mayor Dave Kiffer added that if these budget requests are once again moved to a further date, the costs will only go up.
The Ketchikan City Council met again on December 4 and discussed KPD and KFD budgets in further detail. They voted to add two new police officers to the budget. The Ketchikan Fire Department is currently expecting a 58% increase in their budget and the addition of a fire inspector position.
The city council will continue looking over the budget draft through the month of December.
Get in touch with the author at jack@krbd.org or 907-225-9655.
