DRPS may face budget shortfall
Changes ro provincial grant program could leave cops millions of dollars short
By Graeme McNaughton/The Oshawa Express
Durham police could face a funding shortfall for 2017 thanks to changes made by the province.
Over the holiday break, the province notified police service boards across the province that a number of grants it gives out every year would be consolidated into a single grant which must now be applied for. The grants for which Durham police previously received were not application based.
The province also said that police boards have until Feb. 10 to get their applications in – meaning the board will not find out if it received the grant money until after budgets have been passed.
Currently, those grants amount to $3 million of DRPS’ annual funding.
Chief Paul Martin, DRPS’ top cop, says that while the force knew that changes were in the works for how the province administers its grants, the timing caught them by surprise.
“We knew that the province was planning on changing the way the grants are administered and combining them, as they said, but the problem is the timing. We start our budget cycle in April and, generally speaking, we get it to our police services board by September and it’s approved by the board as late as October,” he tells The Oshawa Express.
“It’s very late in the game to get a letter on Dec. 28 saying, ‘Oh, by the way, that $3 million that we’ve been giving you every year, you have to apply for it and you can get up to that amount but you may not.’ It’s the uncertainty and the timing of it that’s really concerning for us and for other police leaders across the province.”
When Martin was addressing this issue during the latest meeting of region council, he said that the grant money is used to pay officers’ salaries.
“The way it’s paid into our budget right now, it’s partial payment for about 90, 95 officers. If you were to equate it down to full-time equivalence, it’d be roughly 30 to 35,” Martin told councillors.
The police chief says that should the worst-case scenario come to pass and DRPS receives none of the grant money, there will need to be “some serious discussions about what the next steps are because it is a significant impact and it is not something we could absorb, I wouldn’t suggest, easily within our budget.”
Regional council unanimously supported a measure that will call on the province to delay these grant changes until 2018.