Mayor Spencer Warns of Massive Service Cuts and Layoffs if State-Controlled Board of Police Commissioners’ Budget is Finalized

Today, Mayor Cara Spencer warned that St. Louis residents should expect significant service cuts and mass layoffs for City staff if the budget certified by the state-controlled Board of Police Commissioners for the Police Department is finalized at its current amounts.

The budget certified today by the Board would balloon the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department budget to over $250 million. This $250 million figure does not include the required retirement costs, like FICA and health insurance, which are projected to cost a minimum additional $21 million. The figure also does not include the full cost of Marshals and Park Rangers, which will further increase the total costs by an additional $3 million. In total, this budget would bring the new total cost to the City to close to $274 million, a 35.8% increase.

“Our Police Department needs more funding, but so do the other City departments that deliver crucial services to our residents,” said Mayor Spencer. “The budget certified by the Police Board today is wildly out of sync with what the City of St. Louis can afford to do without crippling our other departments, cutting services like trash pickup, park maintenance and fixing our roads. If the Board of Police Commissioners does not change the budget they certified today, they will force the City to look at mass layoffs in other departments to compensate for the cost.”

The SLMPD budget was given to the mayor 17 hours before Wednesday’s Board of Police Commissioners meeting, resulting in the Mayor’s Office and Budget Division having very little time to review the budget before the Board’s vote to certify it.

The state-controlled Board of Police Commissioners does not answer to the citizens of St. Louis, who therefore have no direct say, even as this budget would exceed the amount of funding required by state statute by at least $48.3 million, and in total appears likely to be about $72 million, which would have to come out of budgets for other City departments.

“Department budgets cannot be made in silos, and I hope we can work together to support the outstanding work of the Police Department while also supporting the critical work of other departments and divisions like Streets, Water, Forestry and many others,” said Mayor Spencer. “I urge the Board to work with the City and my office and to remember that the decisions they make impact St. Louisans in massive ways that extend well beyond policing. There’ll be nothing left to police if our City can’t collect St. Louisans’ trash, fix our roads or make this city a place where people want to live, work and visit.”