KLAS-TV Channel 8 News Las VegasI-Team: North Las Vegas Defends Use of "More Cops" Money
NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Did North Las Vegas add the police it should have with the money collected from a quarter-cent sales tax increase?
The city says yes, based on a costly new review that doesn't even identify how many officers it hired. But one lawmaker calls it fuzzy math and is demanding a full accounting.
On the streets of North Las Vegas, there is slightly more than one police officer for every 1,000 people. Its the result of a sales tax hike to put more cops on patrol.
Voters in North Las Vegas overwhelmingly supported the More Cops initiative in 2004, because the city had the lowest ratio of police to population in the Las Vegas valley. But that hasn't changed, despite tens of millions collected in sales tax revenue.
"I don't want the residents and the businesses to think that the money was not used for the police department, because it was," said Acting City Manager Mary Ann Ustick.
Ustick inherited her predecessor's controversial budget decisions. In 2008, instead of hiring additional police officers as required under More Cops, then-City Manager Gregory Rose moved 32 officers already on the payroll into the More Cops fund.
Rose insisted last October the transfers simply corrected a paperwork error. However, a memo suggests the shifts were meant to shore up the city budget.
"Hindsight is 20/20. So would I have done it differently, you know. Probably. But was it a violation of the law? I don't think so," said Ustick.
That viewpoint is substantially supported by an independent examination of the city's compliance with More Cops. Based on the police officer's hire dates, according to reviewers, the majority of those transfers satisfied state law. As did the city's spending on public safety.
"You can say, 'We did it,' but if you did it on paper and not bodies on the street, did you really give the public what they thought they were getting," said State Assemblywoman Marilyn Kirkpatrick.
Kirkpatrick has long voiced suspicion about North Las Vegas' use of the More Cops money. In 2007, when the city refused to open its books, she co-sponsored legislation mandating quarterly spending reports. Now faced with a review, she respectfully compares to animal waste products, Kirkpatrick calls on city leaders to actually hire additional police officers.
"I realize that there are budget shortfalls, but the voters didn't do anything wrong. We've all paid our sales tax. Every time we go somewhere, we thought a quarter of a percent was going to More Cops in our city. So I think that the city needs to give us their plan on how they're going to put it back," she said.
Ustick sighs at the suggestion, based solely on financial restraints. As she defends the decisions of the past, she pledges to follow the spirit of More Cops in the future and hopes the citizens will accept her version of the bottom line.
"There are more police officers now than there were in 2005 and we have to thank that fund for helping us do that," she said.
How many more police officers remains unclear and the figure is not identified in the independent review. Ustick says the city is working on a corrective action plan and she hopes to have it complete within the next two weeks.
