Bellwater's budget season found its flashpoint Thursday night, when Police Chief Roberta Simms' request for a $94 million department budget ran into a competing proposal from council members who want to shift millions of dollars toward mental health and violence-prevention programs.
Simms told the council’s budget committee, meeting as part of the budget season City Manager Marcus Whitfield opened with a warning of an $18.6 million citywide gap, that the department’s request, up from $88.7 million in the current fiscal year, was driven largely by the cost of overtime needed to cover roughly two dozen vacant officer positions the department has been unable to fill despite an active recruiting campaign. “Every open position we can’t fill gets covered by overtime,” Simms said. “That’s not sustainable, and it’s not the way I want to run this department, but it’s the reality of where staffing stands right now.”
The request drew an immediate challenge from Council Members Aisha Muhammad and Terrence Boudreaux, who proposed capping the department’s increase and redirecting roughly $3.5 million toward a mental-health co-response pilot program that would pair licensed clinicians with officers on certain calls in Lowertown and Cedar Hollow. “If two dozen positions are chronically vacant, maybe the answer isn’t just more overtime money,” Muhammad said. “Maybe some of those calls shouldn’t require an armed officer to begin with.”
Simms pushes back
Simms, who has emphasized community policing in Lowertown since taking over the department, said she supported the concept of co-response but disputed the idea that it could be funded by cutting into overtime without creating gaps in basic patrol coverage. “I don’t disagree that some of these calls could use a clinician alongside an officer,” Simms said. “I disagree that you can take $3.5 million out of a budget that’s already stretched thin covering vacancies and expect response times in Cedar Hollow not to suffer.”
I have officers working double shifts most weeks because we don’t have the bodies to fill the schedule any other way. I’m not asking for this money to expand the department. I’m asking for it to keep the department we already have functioning.
Roberta Simms, Chief of Police, Bellwater Police Department
Boudreaux, whose Lowertown district has been the focus of the department’s community policing push, said he wanted to see co-response funded without simply approving Simms’ full request on top of it. “I’ve supported this chief’s community policing work publicly and I’ll keep doing it,” Boudreaux said. “But that doesn’t mean every dollar she asks for should be automatic. I’d like the department to grow into the vacancies it has before we assume it needs more money on top of them.”
A committee compromise, not a resolution
Council Member Patricia Yoon, whose downtown district has seen a string of retail vandalism incidents in recent months, said she was wary of cutting patrol funding given ongoing concerns from Vale Avenue merchants. “I hear the case for co-response and I don’t oppose it,” Yoon said. “But my constituents are asking for more visible patrols, not fewer, and I need to be able to tell them their concerns were heard too.”
After nearly three hours of debate, the budget committee advanced a compromise on a 3-2 vote that would fund a smaller, $1.2 million pilot version of the co-response program while still allowing the department a $91.2 million budget, an increase of $2.5 million over the current year rather than the full $5.3 million increase Simms had requested. The pilot would deploy clinicians alongside officers on a limited set of call types in Lowertown and Cedar Hollow, with an evaluation after its first year.
City Manager Marcus Whitfield, who must incorporate the committee’s recommendation into the budget proposal going to the full council, said the compromise reflected the tension running through this year’s process generally. “Nobody on that committee got the number they walked in wanting,” Whitfield said. “That’s usually a sign a compromise is roughly in the right place, even if nobody’s thrilled about it.”
Simms said she could operate within the $91.2 million figure if it survives the full council vote but reiterated her concern that the vacancy problem would persist without a broader hiring push. “This buys us breathing room,” she said. “It doesn’t solve the recruiting problem, and I’ll be back next year if it hasn’t improved.”
The full council is expected to take up the committee’s recommendation as part of the final budget vote in the coming weeks. Muhammad said she considered the $1.2 million pilot a starting point rather than a final answer. “This is smaller than what we asked for, and I’m not going to pretend I’m satisfied,” she said. “But it’s the first time this city has funded anything like it, and that matters.”