Originally Posted by kane

A lot of this is just small town politicians being dumb and holding personal grudges.

A friend of mine is a cop in a small town and they recently were nearly closed down. They have 13 officers plus about 3-4 other staff for the police department. The city administrator said that because they weren't writing enough tickets that the police were responsible for the $165K deficit that the city was running this year. He claimed most of it was due to overtime and other unforeseen expenses like the fact that two of their police cars had to be replaced. He wanted to close the police department and contract out to the county which would cost about half as much.

The locals were pretty pissed off. the reason they live in this town is because it has low crime and one reason for that is having its own police department that works proactively. At a city council meeting someone came forward and went through a list of every single person on the city payroll and asked the city administrator to explain what that person does and to justify why that person was more important to the city than the police. He got about halfway through the list and things got very ugly.

It all led to a breakdown where the city administrator is stepping down and they are cleaning house because it appears there are a lot of people on the payroll who make good money and don't appear to do much of anything and he was protecting their jobs. It became known that the city administrator didn't like the police chief and was playing politics to get him out at any cost.

It seems this kind of thing happens a lot. When people vote for lower taxes those in charge take away high profile things that effect them directly so that they will see the errors of their ways and later be okay when those taxes are increased again.