SPOKANE VALLEY, Wash. — Spokane Valley is one of the fastest growing cities in Washington, but the size of its police force hasn't kept up.
Tuesday night, after months of discussion, city council members gave the go-ahead on the first phase of beefing up the department.
Ten new patrol officers will be hired over the next year, though that's just a fraction of the more than two dozen a consulting firm says the city needs to meet a growing population and calls for service.
"Response times are getting longer and the amount of time for officer-initiated calls is getting smaller," said city council member Ben Wick.
Spokane Valley's population has risen 22% since 2007, while police calls rose 17% over the last seven years.
Assistant chief Sean Walter says it's not just more calls, but a rise in the level of seriousness with calls for crisis and behavioral health issues.
"Our officers are increasingly dealing with those types of calls and those can be really time consuming, resource intensive," he said.
The ten new positions will cost $2.125 million annually along with a one-time expense of $624,000.
Council voted to use general funds that have historically supplemented street projects.
"The roads shouldn't see too much of a change but we had to reprioritize some of our preservation accounts going into there, so we may focus more on pothole and maintenance repair," Wick said.
"We're going to defer some projects that aren't high priority, maybe until next year," added Deputy Mayor Tim Hattenburg.
A new $20 car tab fee takes effect in July after council members approved it in December; that will add more than $2 million to the streets budget.
It's the next phase of the recommendations to increase public safety that may prove challenging. Wick says the city will need to gather public input on how to approach adding the next round of police positions, which Asst. Chief Walter says will be more detectives and investigators.
"I feel like this kind of stretched our budget to figure out how we can fund, so ten was kind of the max without affecting other levels of service," Wick said. "So as we go to look at the other 18 positions we're going to have to look at some other revenue."
Public feedback sessions will begin in March, where citizens can tell the city what they'd like to see and how they'd be willing to fund more police hires.
More information about those sessions and the project is available here.
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