Although the fire and police departments’ budgets increased between 1-2 percent this year, staffing has been reduced in both departments.

The increase is skewed by contractual agreements to pay for employee and retiree benefits and salaries.

Despite the changes, public safety officials work to ensure services don’t suffer, Staton said.

“The challenge year after year (with) this budget cutting is to make these cuts in a way where people don’t feel the effects,” he said. “So when they dial 911 for a medical emergency, the ambulance shows up in about the same amount of time they showed up a year before.”

But if budget reductions continue, a strain in service is inevitable, Staton said.

“As you shave at the edges, eventually you start to nick part of the substance,” he said.

Protecting the city
Despite strained resources, the East Lansing Police Department must continue to protect residents, East Lansing police Capt. Kim Johnson said.

“With the personnel we have and the resources we have, we have to maintain public safety 24 hours a day,” Johnson said.

About a decade ago, up to 67 officers were employed by the East Lansing Police Department, Johnson said. Now, about 61 are working, although the numbers change frequently with promotions and retirements, he said.

No layoffs have been made, but the department is working to reduce the number of staff positions by choosing not to fill certain positions when they become vacant, whether because of retirement or promotion, Johnson said.

In March, the deputy chief position in the department was eliminated following East Lansing police Chief Juli Liebler’s promotion.

The rest of the staff is responsible for picking up the extra responsibilities, she said.

Past cuts to the detective bureau have hurt the department’s ability to investigate cases, Johnson said.

With less staff, investigations might take longer, and priority is given to more serious crimes, he said.

Funding cuts are supplemented by federal and state grant money. Last year, the department received a $694,000 grant to pay wages for three new police officers over the next three years, Liebler said.

Funding cuts were made to the administration, community policing, detective bureau, police support and records, and parking and code enforcement divisions of the department.

Dispatch and patrol division budgets were not reduced from last year.

“Our first priority is obviously emergency response,” Liebler said. “We tried to make cuts that would enable us to continue to provide immediate response to emergencies and have adequate staffing for (the) patrol division.”

Even with reduced services, East Lansing still will be a safe place to live, said Janee Prince, an East Lansing resident and political science senior.

“Too much cutting can definitely do a lot of damage to any city’s safety,” she said. “But I do feel like they have a pretty stable system.”

Medical emergencies and fires
In the past ten years, about four positions with the East Lansing Fire Department have been cut because of budget reductions, two of which were cut in the last year, East Lansing Fire Chief Randall Talifarro said.

Now, the department is down to two operating fire trucks and two ambulances, one at each of the city’s two stations, to service the entire East Lansing community, East Lansing Fire Marshall Bob Pratt said. Pratt said depending on staffing — vacations and sick days — there might be a third truck in service.

Previously, the department had two operational fire trucks per station.

If a second call is made when the fire trucks are servicing another request, response time might be delayed or the department will call on other local fire departments for assistance, Talifarro said.

Fire trucks sometimes will be sent if an ambulance is serving another call because firefighters also are trained as paramedics, he said.

Budgeting for both appropriate staffing and equipment maintenance is necessary to maintain services, although both have seen cuts in past years, Staton said.

“If you ask a fire chief, ‘How do you define high quality fire service?,’ one of the ways they’ll say is by response time,” he said. “But if you … get to a blazing house fire with one person on the truck, you can’t really do anything. … So arriving there with enough personnel to actually confront the emergency is even more important than response time.”

At this point it’s difficult to determine how much staffing changes will impact fire and medical emergency services, but the cuts have the potential to damage response time and already have reduced the number of workers on duty, Staton said.

“It could be that the cuts that we’ve made have really shaved away at both measures of quality,” Staton said.

Dealing with cuts
In face of cuts, both the East Lansing Fire and Police departments are finding ways to save money and cope with losses.

For years, the East Lansing Fire Department has worked with other local fire departments to split the cost of services and share resources to save money, Talifarro said.

On May 18 the department, along with the Lansing Fire Department and four other local departments, applied for a grant to fund a survey examining ways the departments can further cooperate to save money.

The East Lansing Fire Department is working more with other departments in the area to provide quality services to residents of the city, Talifarro said.

“(Other communities are having) the same staffing pressures,” he said. “We are relying on each other more frequently,”

Workers in the East Lansing Police Department are taking advantage of new technology, such as an automated ticketing system, to increase efficiency and compensate for staffing losses, Liebler said.

For Johnson, taking on some additional responsibilities from the deputy chief is necessary to maintain police services and keep the streets of East Lansing safe.

“We do the best we can,” Johnson said. “The job still has to get done.”