Montgomery police and fire officials were mum Wednesday about where they will make the cuts necessary to comply with County Executive Ike Leggett’s orders to reduce spending.
Leggett has told department heads they must inform him by Friday of how they plan to reduce spending by at least 2 percent, as the county braces for a $401 million projected budget gap in the next fiscal year.
Although Leggett included funding in the current budget for 58 additional firefighters and 43 new positions in the police department, rumors swirled Wednesday that county police may have to reduce the size of their recruitment class.
Police spokesman Lt. Paul Sparks, however, said nothing was set in stone yet.
“There’s a lot of things on the table, that might be one of them, but I don’t know at this point,” Sparks said. “Certainly if you hire fewer people, you spend less money but the balance is that it is our mission to provide a high level of public safety and service to Montgomery County.”
Manger told The Examiner last week that he wanted to make cuts that “are invisible to the public” but that 87 percent of the police budget is in personnel costs and he may need to delay filling some open civilian positions.
“We’ve got to make sure we have 911 operators,” Manger said, “but we have a lot of analyst-type positions, administrative support-type positions that we may need to delay filling. [If you do this], you have people sort of having to do two jobs at once. You can’t do this forever but doing it temporarily could save us some money.”
Montgomery School Superintendent Jerry Weast announced a hiring freeze last week, in which only select Montgomery County Public Schools’ vacant teaching positions can be filled for the rest of the school year, to meet budget needs.
Fire spokesman Pete Piringer said Fire Chief Tom Carr has asked division chiefs for suggestions on how to cut costs.
“Everything across the board is on the table,” Piringer said. “I’m not familiar with specific suggestions other than closely looking at overtime. The focus is on service delivery.”
Piringer said Carr did not want to reduce the size of the firefighters’ recruit class either.
“I don’t think he would want to do that,” Piringer said. “But it may not be up to us.”
