Police, schools face budget cuts

by Ben Weyl

While some college students have trouble scraping up money for the end of the semester, the town of Grinnell is also strapped for cash, and their lack of money leads to what most would argue are graver circumstances. Recently, budget cuts have plagued both the school district and the police department. Both the Grinnell-Newburg superintendent and Grinnell police chief cited low economic growth and state legislative decisions as reasons for their tight budgets.

Grinnell-Newburg School District

Recently, Superintendent David Stoakes sent a newsletter with the Grinnell Herald-Register listing the many reductions the Grinnell-Newburg school district has faced since 2001. According to the newsletter, the cuts include the elimination of about 20 teaching and para-educator positions, the elimination of three assistant coaching positions and the reduction in substitute teacher and principals’ salaries.

Stoakes said the budget reductions are not new to the school district. “We’ve really experienced budget reductions the last five or six years,” he said. “There have been two main reasons for that. One has been the lower than normal allowable growth, new money, new dollars, coming from the state, and the other has been our declining enrollment.”

According to Stoakes, the decrease in allowable growth happened for mainly two reasons. “One, we saw a downturn in the economy over the last two or three years, and that certainly has had an impact on the amount of revenue available to the state legislature,” he said. “And the other thing is that [state legislators] have made millions of dollars worth of tax cuts over the last three or four years. The philosophy of the Republican-dominated [state] legislature is to try to stimulate economic growth through cutting back on taxes… and they’ve also started some economic development initiatives to try to get the economy going.”

The declining enrollment in schools is not unique to the Grinnell-Newburg district. “It is something that many, many school districts in the state have dealt with for quite a while,” Stoakes said. “It’s probably hit us harder the last couple years because we’ve seen a bigger decrease than we’ve had previously. Our enrollment generally from the 1970s has been a gradual decline, but the last couple years it seems like we’ve gotten hit with pretty good decreases in numbers. I’m really not sure why that is.”

According to Stoakes, the district has lost 122 kids since 2001. “That’s a pretty big chunk,” he said. Last year’s senior class graduated 135 students.

Stoakes, like many, is not sure how to combat the problems. He said that people could try to make the case to the Iowa legislature that the school districts need more money, although he acknowledged that education supporters have to compete with many different interest groups that are also looking for tax dollars from the legislature. In order to increase enrollment, Stoakes suggested that the town needed to bring more jobs and more families into the town.

Grinnell Police Department

The school district is not the only organization with money problems. The police department currently faces budget issues and the amount of total officers in the Grinnell department has decreased, in part due to the lack of funds.
According to Police Chief Jody Matherly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the police department staff had about eight or nine officers. “We climbed to an all-time high in the late 90s, early 2000s to about 17 sworn personnel,” Matherly said. “Since then we’ve gone back down to 14 sworn personnel, and that’s within the last few months.”
Matherly said that the reduction in staff is due to more officers leaving and the inability to replace them. “We’ve had three leave in the last year,” he said. One went to the private industry for better hours and more money. He sells insurance now. Two others went to different departments with more perks: one to the county sheriff’s office and the other to the Ankeny police department. “It’s pretty common for officers to leave smaller departments, Matherly said. “We sometimes tend to be a stepping stone for officers to go on to bigger and better things.”
The difficulty in replacing the departed officers is because “simply put, there’s less money coming into the coffers,” Matherly said. “With Reinvent Iowa and some of these programs the state has done to boost the state economy, cities tend to see a little less money, and that has happened.” Matherly also said that the department’s expenditures on health insurance and retirement benefits have increased.
Matherly believes the department is facing a fairly normal situation. “I think it’s safe to say any city in the nation has two or three years of good economy and then the economy drops. And we’re in that low period right now,” he said. “Three or four years ago when we were at 17 officers, the economy called for that. There were also some grants available, and we were able to put officers on through grants, and those have ceased to exist at this point.”
Matherly is restructuring the police department and the hours officers work to adjust to the new numbers, even if some of the changes are not entirely popular, he said.
Matherly does not foresee the smaller police force as a problem for college students. “I look at the college as regular citizens. They’re just like neighbors down the road,” he said. “If you guys had a problem and you called us, would we able to respond and answer it? Yes. We average under a two-minute response time and we’re going to continue in that direction. The upside of the college is they have Security that we are able to work with too. So between us and them, we can solve any issues or problems that occur on campus.”