After weathering a hiring freeze, shedding $1.1 million in wages
and coping with more violent crime, Gilroy’s police officers have
geared up their public relations machine to keep residents in tune
with their apparent plight.
After weathering a hiring freeze, shedding $1.1 million in wages and coping with more violent crime, Gilroy’s police officers have geared up their public relations machine to keep residents in tune with their apparent plight.
“As you no doubt have read, being a Gilroy police officer has become an increasingly dangerous and difficult job. But we’re working hard to stay ahead of crime and violence in Gilroy in the face of diminishing resources,” reads a mailer the Gilroy Police Officer Association sent out to residents this week.
One side shows a collage of four Disptach headlines from the spring and summer of 2009. “Three stabbed in gang-related incident,” reads one headline. “Man stabs teenage boy, punches younger sister,” reads another.
On the reverse side, POA President Mitch Madruga encourages the city council, which he has criticized extensively, to “cut its own benefits, stop spending millions on amusement parks and real estate developer bailouts, and consider using a small portion of the city’s taxpayer-funded reserve to make it through this budget crisis.” The council recently shed its own part-time wages by 10 percent, similar to the percent unions took, but critics have described the move as insincere face-saving because it only amounts to about $8,000 a year.
The bottom portion of the mailer has postcard for residents to tear out and check their willingness to support the force. The mailer is the latest campaign against the council after the body voted 5-2, with Councilmen Craig Gartman and Perry Woodward dissenting, to approve an agreement with the 59-member POA earlier this month that will save the city $1.1 million while imposing furloughs and other cuts on law enforcement.
Along with the city’s non-represented employees and its municipal, managerial and fire unions, the agreement helped the city save a total of $3.1 million this fiscal year. That brought the deficit down to $1.6 million compared to $37 million in expenditures.
Police Chief Denise Turner recently sent a letter to council members decrying potential state cuts that would further strap the department, and local conservative activist Mark Zappa has jump-started a recall initiative against Mayor Al Pinheiro. Zappa has lambasted the mayor’s lack of leadership in regard to public safety, pointing to, among other things, Pinheiro’s call for police to shed their uniform allowances, which the split union agreed to in the latest contract agreement.
Zappa’s burgeoning recall campaign so far only targeted the mayor, who could not immediately be reached for comment Friday. In the past, Pinherio has described Zappa’s initiative as the product of a personal vendetta.
