Bob Hackworth Wants to Budget More for Public Safety

This week, we asked the candidates:

• What do you think is the biggest public safety concern for Dunedin residents, and how do you plan to address it, if you are elected? 

Bob Hackworth responds:

Two recent stories on The Patch illustrate that increasing crime is a legitimate concern in Dunedin neighborhoods. The first is  and the second is Dunedin Crime: Larceny Spikes in August.

I posted a comment back in August on the first story, saying “The substantial cuts to public safety funding in Dunedin during the last four years have been very costly to the health, safety and welfare of residents in our city and especially so for the south side neighborhoods. The cuts were absolutely unnecessary.”

With a citywide budget of more than $73 million, the cuts to public safety services by the current administration are policy decisions that could have and should have been avoided. The cuts were not forced upon our elected officials by “difficult financial times” as the mayor argued; instead those elected officials forced them upon residents while citing a misleading economic rhetoric. Before they and bragged about tax-rate cuts they should have first fully funded the increasing public safety needs in our community. Common sense leadership would have been to fund what's necessary as far [as] public safety service is concerned, especially in the face of an increasing need and even if hard choices had to be made in other areas of the budget.

How I plan to address this problem if elected is simple. I’ll prioritize public safety by providing increasing resources to law enforcement whenever and wherever they are needed, without excuses. It’s a mayor’s primary duty.  

Budgeting for public safety should always be a question of, how much will it cost to keep us safe? Not, how much money do we have? I’ll set aside any rigid political agenda to always put the safety of residents and families first. And I’ll never reject a federal grant, like Mayor Eggers did, for a Safe Route to School program, ignoring the critical needs of my own town for a purely ideological reason (let’s not accept federal funds on principle). The taxpayer monies he rejected (our money after all) went to provide needed sidewalks and bike lanes in some other, now safer, Florida city. That makes NO sense.

See also, Mayor Dave Eggers' response.

Related Coverage:

• Patch Podium: Bob Hackworth on Spurring Development
• Bob Hackworth on the Patch Podium: Experience
• Bob Hackworth on the Patch Podium: Quality of Life