Cost of Police Force Becoming the Bottom Line for Voters : Law enforcement: City officials cite fear-inspiring sums, but supporters claim that residents would pay no more than they do now. Independent estimates fall somewhere in between.

WEST HOLLYWOOD —  Just ahead of the Methodist church group in June’s Gay Pride parade was a police black-and-white, lights flashing and the words Hollywood Police Department emblazoned on the door. The uniformed pair inside grinned and waved to the crowd.

Although the car came from a Sun Valley prop house and the officers were just a couple of residents in rented costumes, the crowd roared. It is that cozy image of officers drawn from the community and cheered by proud neighbors that is the guiding vision for Proposition AA, a controversial ballot drive to create an independent West Hollywood police department.

The debate has been as sharp as any in the rambunctious city’s history, flavored by the usual gay activism and the stirrings of an adolescent city growing up, finding its own voice and calling its own shots. But when it comes down to it, the make-or-break question is going to be whether the city can afford to replace its $8.4-million contract with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department at a time of recessionary cutbacks.

“We need to complete the process of our becoming a city,” said Robert Pierson, who ran unsuccessfully for the City Council this year and is a supporter of the initiative. “But the bottom-line issue is related to cost--whether the community feels the value of being fully independent is worth it or not. It’s a question of value rather than cost.”

The projected cost of a new department varies depending on who’s talking. City officials cite fear-inspiring sums, but supporters claim that residents would pay no more than they do now. Independent estimates fall somewhere in between--possibly $2 million to $3 million more than now--meaning the real decision is whether adding local control is worth the price.

Since cityhood in 1984, West Hollywood has acted ambitiously to take care of its own, with rent control, gay rights, and a broad safety net of services for its poor and sick and for its Soviet emigre community. But, eight years later, the Sheriff’s Department still patrols its streets, one of 42 contract arrangements with cities in Los Angeles County.

West Hollywood would be the first city in the county to establish its own police force in at least 15 years. And statewide, most new cities have stayed with contract arrangements, although a small handful have set up police departments because of unhappiness with the way they were being served.

With budget cuts this year of almost $2 million and the likelihood of still more, city officials and voters are edgy about taking on major new expenses that would spell cutbacks in existing services. Four of the five members of the City Council oppose the measure, and the fifth, Paul Koretz, has said he will support it only if it is affordable.

Both sides are keenly aware of the importance of the price tag, and their projections are miles apart.

City Hall officials have estimated that it would cost between $13.3 million and $14.6 million a year--a 60% to 75% increase--to launch a police department and build, buy or lease a station house.

That projection is based on a 150-member department, roughly the total number of Sheriff’s Department employees posted in the West Hollywood station now. The city’s estimate, which Public Safety Coordinator Nancy Greenstein calls conservative, envisions a department with 75 street cops, plus supervisors and civilian staff.

But West Hollywood Citizens for Better Police Protection, which gathered more than 4,500 signatures to put the proposal on the Nov. 3 ballot, contends that it would cost no more than the current $8.4-million contract to assemble a department of 54 basic patrol officers to protect the two-square-mile city.

The group, in a 57-page budget proposal, argues that only about 100 Sheriff’s Department employees actually serve West Hollywood because the station is also responsible for patrolling unincorporated county land in Universal City, the Veterans Administration hospital complex in West Los Angeles, Franklin Canyon and the county-owned Pan Pacific Park in the Fairfax district. The group says $8.3 million a year would replace that number as well as pay the costs of acquiring the sheriff’s station through a joint effort with private investors.

Interviews with law enforcement officials, local politicians and consultants around the state suggest that the true cost lies somewhere between the two estimates.

All communities are different and exact comparisons impossible, but officials and consultants who have helped set up police departments in West Sacramento, East Palo Alto, Cathedral City and other cities said running a police force generally costs about 30% more than a contract with a county Sheriff’s Department. For West Hollywood, that would mean an annual law enforcement cost of $10.9 million.

One private consultant, speaking on condition that he not be named, examined the competing camps’ figures in West Hollywood and estimated that it would cost $11.1 million a year to run a city police force. Ideally, he said, such a force should have 57 officers, which is closer to the staffing proposed by the initiative group.

West Hollywood spends about $233 for each of its 36,000 residents on law enforcement, less than neighboring cities with independent police departments. Culver City spends $355 per person, Beverly Hills $553 and Santa Monica $279. Initiative supporters point out, though, that Manhattan Beach’s Police Department is cheaper, $218.

“Our feeling from what we’ve seen is that it’s probably cheaper to contract,” said Robert Fuller, a senior analyst in the state’s Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.

“I’ve never found where you come out with a lower price when you have your own department,” said Buford Nichols, a consultant with the Santa Ana firm of William Hamilton & Associates, which studied the likely costs of creating a department in Cathedral City nine years ago. The city was so disenchanted with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department that it opted to set up its own department, despite start-up expenses and first-year operating costs that were about 25% higher than the Sheriff’s Department contract.

But not all cities have found it more expensive to make the switch. Officials in the Riverside County city of Murrieta, which incorporated last year, decided to establish a police department after projecting that it would cost about the same as a contract with the county Sheriff’s Department, said William Knight, who headed the study and now chairs the Public Safety Commission. He said the price has worked out as planned.

The reason for the typical price jump is that cities with their own forces each have to set up services, such as dispatching centers, jails, record-keeping and others, that are shared countywide by a Sheriff’s Department.

Sheriff’s Capt. William Mangan said West Hollywood gets a bargain from having a fully staffed station virtually all to itself, even though it pays the same basic rate for street-level patrols as contract cities that have to share a station with other communities. Mangan is the commander of the Lomita sheriff’s station and former head of the bureau that oversees the Sheriff’s Department’s contracts with cities.

Though the West Hollywood station is also responsible for other Westside territory, Sheriff’s Department figures show that all but about 1% of the calls that came into the station last year came from West Hollywood.

When cities such as West Hollywood buy protection from the sheriff, they contract for the patrols on the street, by shift. For one eight-hour daytime shift this year, for example, the city will contract for three one-person car patrols, one officer on foot, one traffic enforcement officer and two officers on bicycles. The price for each service includes huge overhead charges that help cover the county’s costs of keeping those deputies on the street--cars, weapons, commanders, clerical staff, supplies and other expenses. In other words, the city doesn’t directly buy the captain who supervises the station or the detectives who investigate crimes there; those salaries come from the overhead paid by cities countywide.

Supporters of the ballot initiative decry the lack of control over the rising sheriff budget, calling it a “black box” that hides how much services actually cost. A city police force would give local taxpayers better control over what they’re spending on law enforcement, said Adam Devejian, who prepared the budget estimate for the pro-initiative forces. Whereas other cities have highly detailed police budgets, West Hollywood’s is just half a page long, he said.

“All you really see is the bottom-line cost,” Devejian said. “All we see is the deputy in the street. How they support that deputy and supervise that deputy is decided downtown.”

Greenstein, the city’s public safety coordinator, acknowledged that even she does not know exactly how much it costs the Sheriff’s Department to carry out the city’s contract.

“If you have a bargain and it’s honest and it’s legal,” she said, “I don’t try to figure out how much they spend on each item.”

There are those who believe that the line-item cost doesn’t really matter.

William Knight, Murrieta’s public safety commissioner, said residents’ control over law enforcement was a key reason for cityhood in the first place.