Submitted by Brian Raney Member, RTM District 9, writing only for himself
As the proposer of the motion at the May 2018 RTM meeting mentioned in the Letter to the Editor, “GROUP LETTER: Greenwich Police Union Should Not Endorse Political Candidates,” published on September 24, 2020, I would like to provide some perspective on it.
The motion was to reduce the GPD Uniformed Patrol “100s” by $90K. This was due to an increase in overtime of 7.7%, when the BET guidelines that year were 2.5% for “100s”. $90K is less than 0.4% of the $22,553,005 GPD budget that year.
It is a stretch to describe such a proposed reduction as an effort “to defund the Greenwich police uniformed patrol account in the 2018 Town budget.” It is not a stretch to describe the motion as a effort to contain rising costs.
I would contrast that attention to the budget by Ms. Fiorello with that of her opponent, Ms. Stowe (Chair of the BOE Budget Committee), who, while discussing the need to find cost savings in response to the BET’s flat 2020-2021 proposed budget, said, “These are the conversations we should start having in the Budget Committee.”
I would suggest that those are conversations that should be happening constantly in the BOE Budget Committee, not just when there is a crisis.
Brian Raney
Member, RTM District 9, but I write only for myself
Editor’s note: Letters to the Editor in support of local candidates in the Nov 3, 2020 election may be submitted to [email protected] for consideration beginning July 15 and with a hard deadline of Oct 26, 2020 at noon.