City looking at options for police, fire after public safety levy's failure

Great Falls voters spoke loudly on election day, clearly stating that they are unwilling at this time to authorize a substantial increase in property taxes to bolster fire, police, and municipal court services. Nearly two-thirds voted no to the Public Safety Levy proposal, which would have added $13.7 million annually to emergency service funding.

However, the growing needs that funding was intended to address are not going away. Rising crime, the shortage of emergency response resources and an overburdened municipal court system are today what they were the day before the election and can only be expected to become more critical with the passage of time. Great Falls’ homeowners and businesses may have forestalled an increase in their property taxes, but will not escape the expense of increasing crime, delayed emergency response times and a court system overwhelmed by its case load.

This, in summary, was the response of multiple city officials when asked about the path forward following the defeat of the Public Safety Levy. None expressed shock that the levy proposal had failed, but all reaffirmed that Great Falls must continue to address deficiencies within its police, fire, and municipal court systems in the years ahead.

“The problems with increased crime and the challenges that growth brings are not going away,” said Mayor Bob Kelly. “We’re just going to have to become more attuned and establish more priorities about when we can act, and where we can act.”

Kelly, who will retire in January after his fourth term as mayor, said he wasn’t surprised that the levy failed, but was somewhat dismayed at the margin of defeat.

“The timing could not have been worse for us,” he said of Nov. 7 election. “We started this levy months and months ago with putting it on the ballot this November, then we entered into a time that was not opportune. After the library levy passed we got hit with new tax evaluations and there was a lot of controversy over that. I just think the community has limited resources.”

Over the past five months city officials engaged in a series of public forums to explain how public safety resources were being spent and where the shortfalls are. During these, department heads described a system in which police response to some sexual assault and property crimes must be delayed or deferred, where the fire department is no longer capable of meeting insurance industry standards for response times, and where several criminal defendants have had their cases dismissed because the municipal court could not respond to them in a timely manner.

None of that is likely to change in the near term.

Weighing the risks in prioritizing

“One of the risks you take in pulling back the curtain on your public safety resources is that you expose the areas where you don’t have enough to do the job that people expect you to do,” Kelly said. “So, the prioritization of the most heinous crimes will rise to the top, and those that we used to consider very important and very tragic will have to wait until the community is able to make the sacrifice to get us the resources that those folks need to move forward.”

In nearly every instance the greatest shortage has been the number of personnel available to respond to the city’s public safety demands. Roughly 40% of the intended proceeds of the Public Safety Levy were earmarked for Great Falls Fire/Rescue, and the bulk of that, $3.2 million, was targeted toward hiring 32 more firefighters.

As an example of the current funding shortfalls the Great Falls Fire Department notes that the geographic footprint of the city has nearly doubled since the last time a new fire station was built in 1969. Yet the number of uniformed firefighters has gradually declined from more than 100 a few decades ago to just 63 today. Assistant Fire Chief Mike McIntosh was not surprised by the election’s outcome but warns that Great Falls is on the cusp of being unable to effectively respond to multiple fire/safety emergencies at a single moment. He offered the city’s Fourth of July readiness as an example.

“We have four stations staffed with 13 personnel at a maximum, barring anybody on vacation or injured,” McIntosh noted. “The City of Great Falls is the only Class 1 municipality within the State of Montana that allows personal fireworks to be shot off within the city limits. If we get into a major working incident on the Fourth of July, we’re going to have to commit all 13 personnel to that incident. We have numerous other fires that happen on a consistent basis at that time, and right there we’re already taxed. There could be a severe amount of damage before we can possibly get people to come back into work to start mitigating those other hazards. It could be very, very quick that our staffing becomes overtaxed.”

Great Falls property owners can also expect to see an immediate increase in their homeowner’s insurance. The premiums property owners pay are governed by the ISO, the Insurance Services Office, which measures how well local fire departments are able to protect communities and homes from fire related emergencies.

Insurance companies use the ISO Fire Score to set home insurance rates, as a home that is less likely to be severely damaged or destroyed by fire is cheaper to insure. A community’s ISO score is determined by many factors including fire department staffing, average emergency response times, and the number and proximity of fire stations within the community. McIntosh said the City of Great Falls has already been warned that unless it begins meeting these ISO standards its fire score will continue to decline with each subsequent audit, thus raising local insurance rates.

“Homeowners across the city are already seeing their home insurance premiums increasing on their renewals,” McIntosh said. “We’re going to continue to see a potential cost increase for insurance, both homeowners and commercial insurance as well.”

More concerning than the financial costs is the potential for a catastrophic emergency or twin of events to which the city’s emergency services are unable to effectively respond. McIntosh said he hopes that never happens, but that it’s a possibility that cannot be dismissed.

“I can tell you that we as the fire department, the Great Falls Police Department, the prosecutors, everybody in public safety right now is doing everything that they possibly can and that we’ve already reduced services where we can,” he said. “We hope there isn’t a major catastrophe that happens in our community. We’re hoping that down the road … we don’t have to have that severe event happen for the public to realize, oh, we wish we would have had more resources on the street to help with this.”

State taxation policy a concern

One of the major impediments to consistent funding for community services is Montana’s tax policy. Under Montana law local municipal and county governments are only authorized to raise property tax rates by ½ of the average rate of inflation over the prior three years. It’s a system meant to force local governments to reapproach voters every time taxation receipts fall behind actual costs for goods and services.

“What I think a lot of people don’t understand is that the city has to go out and buy goods and services and they have to do it within a market that inflation impacts,” said City Commissioner Rick Tryon. “Even though we can only raise the money that goes into the general fund by one-half of the three-year average of inflation, inflation goes up by whatever rate it decides to. We are in effect getting gobbled up as time goes on.”

Tryon said that he has a deep respect and confidence in the public’s vote on what they can afford, but that the taxation system in Montana is flawed and that the State Legislature needs to take up the funding challenge confronting the state’s municipal and county governments.

“We need to reform our property tax system,” Tryon said. “We cannot rely on homeowners and businesses to pay for everything all the time at every level of government. It’s unsustainable and it’s going to be a conundrum going forward.”

According to Tryon, nowhere will that shortfall be more evident than in Great Falls in the decades ahead. He observed that Great Falls is poised for substantial growth in the near future, and that the city and its residents need to be prepared for what’s coming.

Tryon pointed to the Sentinel Project, a $96 billion effort by the U.S. Air Force to completely revamp and rebuild the nation’s Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) system beginning in 2030. That project is forecast to bring up to 5,000 temporary workers into Great Falls, testing the city’s public services well beyond what they currently handle.

“A lot of those people who are going to be impacting this community for four- or five-years, they’re going to stay,” Tryon said. “Add to that Great Falls is being discovered like Bozeman was, like Missoula and Kalispell have been. That’s coming our way. There’s no way we can avoid that. We can either be prepared for it or we just let it happen.”

“How do the people in this community want to grow?” he asked. “How do we want to handle the growth that is inevitably coming our way? That applies to our public safety posture as well as developing this growth plan and policy next year. My thoughts as an individual commissioner are to break it down over a period of time. Maybe one year we address police and then maybe fire or the courts. The other option is possibly doing the bond first and maybe a levy later on. There are several different options, but my preference would be to address the police issue first and then spread it out over a several years.”

Mayor Kelly invited those who believe that adequate public funding for Great Falls’ police, fire and municipal justice system is simply a matter of reallocating existing resources to attend the upcoming municipal budget meetings.

“If they can discover funds that we haven’t tapped or explore ideas that we haven’t exploited we would love to hear that,” Kelly said, “but I can tell that having been in city government for over 10 years we’ve been incredibly creative in cutting back the areas where we could. What’s happening now is that the services that the city expects are suffering, and they’re not going to improve going forward.”

“I truly think the public supports public safety here in Great Falls and I don’t think this (election) is an indication of a lack of support for that personally,” Kelly added. “What I do think it is that financially the community is not ready to make the sacrifice to themselves and their bottom line to pay more for these resources.”

With the new year a new city commission will take office and will be presented with the same public safety dilemmas that have confronted Great Falls for more than two decades.

“We have a new commission, we have a new mayor, so we’ll probably do a strategic planning session sometime in February after the new commission is seated and determine how we go forward from there,” Tryon said. “I can pretty confidently say that we will certainly not just come back next year with the same plan, but we’re going to have to restructure how we do this in a way that’s more palatable to voters that they can afford. The other option is to just continue with the status quo and not do anything and let the chips fall where they may. That’s kind of our two options, but we definitely cannot come back with such a large ask next year.”

“We have always looked at the fact that if the levy and the bond were both to fail – but just because they failed doesn’t mean we’re not going to continue to ask,” McIntyre added. “I would say be prepared to see some type of levy/bond presentation to come again for the next couple of elections cycles until something gets put into place.”

This article originally appeared on Great Falls Tribune: Great Falls officials respond to defeat of Public Safety Levy defeat