MPD Budget Overruns

Twenty million dollars here, twenty million dollars there, and before you know it you are talking real money.

In a $1.9 billion annual budget, two years of big expense overruns in the Minneapolis Police Department do not carry existential weight. Yet some of us find it dismaying, not only for the dollars involved—heck, at the rate I pay property taxes to the city it would take me almost 18,000 years to cover the overages—but at least equally important, for the management deficiencies it reveals, and not just in MPD.

I’ve supported Chief O’Hara (including in these pages) and his leadership, and I support the idea of a Community Safety Department. And I’ve supported Mayor Frey; I admire his energy and his vision for the city. But I can’t let any of these individuals or constructs off the hook for the MPD budget overruns.

In any enterprise of any size, department heads are expected to exercise stewardship of, and accountability for, the financial resources they are given. One can understand that there is nothing in a police chief’s education, training and experience that would necessarily make him or her a budget/finance whiz. Doesn’t matter, though. It’s a high-priority responsibility for any department head to, say it with me, exercise stewardship of, and accountability for, the financial resources they are given.

Did Chief O’Hara have, within his command organization, a Chief Financial Officer equivalent who would at all times be on top of the department’s finances, and who would sound the alarm to the Chief when things went awry? If not, why didn’t Commissioner Barnette provide one? Or better yet, assign a senior finance member of his own team to act as MPD’s CFO, thus providing better Community Safety Department oversight?

And for that matter, why wasn’t the Commissioner more aware of the mounting budget variances, virtually all of them negative, as they built up? Doesn’t he check in at least monthly with the budget performance of all five of the departments within his purview? And if any one of them is showing big negative variances, doesn’t that become the topic of a tough, priority conversation?

You might say a former judge also may not have the kind of education, training and experience that would lead to great finance savvy. But Commissioner Barnette was the Chief Judge in Hennepin County, which carries with it substantial administrative responsibilities, including watching the money.

The nature of the overruns needs to be questioned also. Having watched the City Council majority attempt to block at every turn MPD’s efforts to rebuild the department’s staffing at least to the levels required by the City Charter, I can understand and readily forgive the part of the problem caused by overtime paid to the cops we have because of the cops we don’t have. That’s on the City Council majority, not the Chief. And to some degree, I can see the argument that no one could foresee the Operation Metro Surge invasion, which drove a lot of unplanned personnel expense. But that’s trickier, because we have not yet seen any real public accounting of what, exactly, we got for the deployment of cops in an all-hands-on-deck fashion. What did they do other than be present on the streets? Or was that enough? There may be good answers to these questions, but I don’t think we citizens have seen them.

And while I’m hardly ever in sympathy with Council Member Chughtai’s views about anything, her insistent questioning of the Chief about overruns, line item by line item, does show us that the $20 million variances were not just about paying overtime to cops. If that CFO, who probably doesn’t exist within MPD but should, was seeing line item after line item running above budget, he or she would aggressively counsel the Chief to slow down spending wherever possible. Maybe the Harleys could indeed wait another year.

Then we come to the question of why the overages had little, if any, visibility until they exploded into public view within the appointment ratification processes for both the Commissioner and the Chief. I am certainly aware of the many sources of tension in City Hall in these times. I know that beating up on the Chief and the Mayor is the favorite sport of the City Council majority. I know that observing all the niceties of good management gets a lot more complicated in the goldfish bowl we call government, especially when people in factions don’t like people in other factions very much.

Still, any department head in any sector knows that you don’t surprise higher-level officials with bad financial news, ever.

Some observers of city politics and governance have told me the Council was aware of the budget problems all along but kept quiet about them until they could use them as a big club to wield during the commissioner and chief reappointment processes. While that would be totally in character for the current Council majority, I’m skeptical, if only because that majority has shown itself to be so illiterate in municipal finance that I’m not sure they’d have the ability to interpret the reports they see routinely from month to month.

And the Mayor? It appears to me either he didn’t know about the budget overruns as they were mounting, which would be a failure for both him and the Chief, or he did know, but hoped they would be seen as just another kerfuffle among all the other kerfuffles in City Hall. Not his finest moment, either, though he’s had plenty of other fine moments.

Well, it’s a $1.9 billion budget. The city has bigger issues and problems than this. But when (if?) we appoint the next commissioner, and the next chief, among all the other “must-haves” for these leadership roles, let’s be sure either they are strong financial managers or they have one right at their side.