Longview proposes small hike to hire three additional street patrol officers

Street patrols are "the backbone of a police department," but a tax proposal to increase them is coming at a bad time

The number of police officers patrolling Longview streets — 36 officers for 24/7 service — is the same as it was in 1980.

Since then, the number of police calls has increased 43%. The city’s population has increased 23 percent and its boundaries have expanded, particularly on the west end.

Police work has become more complex and burdensome with the advent of police cameras and growth in calls involving people with mental health problems. Competition to hire police officers has increased, and as a consequence pay and benefits have zoomed up, too.

These facts and trends are ample justification for Longview voters to approve a tiny sales tax to increase police street patrols — even though it’s obvious that the timing of this measure is not good.

Listed on the November General Election ballot as Proposition 1, the measure seeks a one-tenth of 1% sales tax increase that is projected to raise $500,000 annually. The tax would add a penny to a $10 purchase or 10 cents to a $100 purchase. It would not apply to auto or food purchases.

Most of the money would go to hire three new patrol officers to expand street patrol staffing on swing shifts — the 1:30 p.m.-to-midnight period that accounts for the most service calls, according to Longview Police Chief Robert Huhta.

The agency has two street patrol swing shifts. One would get two new officers — bringing total staffing for one of those shifts to eight (including a sergeant) — and the other shift would get a single addition, bringing it to seven. Day and graveyard shifts would remain at six officers, Huhta said.

Additional patrols would help reduce response timesimprove safety and deter crime, Huhta said.

It costs about $133,000 annually to add a new police officer (including benefits), and it takes about a year to train them before rookies are ready to patrol on their own.

Competition to find new police hires is fierce. The Seattle City Council, for example, recently increased bonuses for police “lateral hires” — officers hired to take a position similar to their previous police assignment — from $30,000 to $50,000.

The Longview City Council voted unanimously in July to put the police tax to voters. But the \ vote is coming at a politically inopportune time.

The council just increased the Business & Occupation (B&0) tax and the utility tax to help balance its 2025 and 2026 budgets, which were projected to be $8 million and $11.3 million in the red, respectively.

Those increases will raise nearly $3 million in additional revenue next year. The utility tax will increase the average water-sewer-garbage-recycling-stormwater bill by $11 a month, or $22 for a two-month billing period.

The city also is asking all departments to make 10% cuts, a need that led to the 13 staff cuts announced Thursday. Those cuts include 1.5 police FTEs in support staff positions that will be left vacant. No police officer positions will be trimmed, according to Huhta.

In addition, the costs related to fallout from of the new council’s controversial decision to fire Kris Swanson in March are rising to settle claims, pay severance packages, hire additional staff and pay legal bills. The full costs may never be known, but they will easily exceed $500,000 and likely will be significantly more.

The optics of that situation are bad, and some voters may feel like voting against the police measure to satisfy a grudge. That would be shortsighted.

Two things are important to keep in mind:

One, whatever the Swanson-related costs might end up totaling, they are not a major long-term driver of the city’s financial trouble. Two, like many Washington cities, Longview is in a budget bind largely due to several factors, chiefly the state’s property tax limit, inflation and rising costs of jailing misdemeanor drug offenders.

Without new tax revenues and budget cuts, the city would deplete all its cash reserves within five years, according to city fiscal projections. The council simply could not ignore the problem.

Its unfortunate that these challenges are hitting just as the city is asking for a tax hike to hire more cops. But voting against the measure out of spite is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

The additional tax burden — though small — might be a more compelling reason to oppose the measure; but the growth in police caseload, the swelling size of the city and the need to keep up with crime are compelling reasons to vote for it.

Police and fire protection account for about 60% of the city’s operational expenditures. Over the past decades, LPD has added a street crimes unit and two school resource officers while street patrols have remained the same. Total department staffing is at 60, up from the low 50s years ago, Huhta said.

It’s important now to boost street patrols, he said, noting that West Longview residents especially have asked for beefed up police presence.

“Patrol shifts are the backbone of a police department.”