The Columbia City Council will add to the city’s fire and police pension fund and has scaled back the rights of its Citizens Police Review Board.
The city’s general fund, which supports many of Columbia’s day-to-day services and operations, will allocate an additional $1 million to pensions in the upcoming fiscal year. But that’s after a second amendment which would have added $300,000 more was defeated.
City finance director Matthew Lue said removing the additional $300,000 makes the plan more fiscally sound in the long term.
“This is really like a mortgage for a house where you’re paying that mortgage down each year. That’s basically what we’re doing with that police and fire pension. So, in year 28 of that pension, we are still on schedule to have it fully funded,” Lue said.
The Council unanimously voted against that amendment because a financial analysis deemed it potentially unsustainable as the pension fund is added to over the next 28 years.
Jim McDonald, the city’s assistant director of finance, also recommended against the additional $300,000. He said the initial proposal of $1 million struck a balance between improving the pension and accounting for what the general fund could afford to pay.
“To add an additional amount to that could potential cause issues with what our forecasting is for the general fund,” McDonald said.
The Council passed the million-dollar addition, which had been developed with the help of financial actuaries. The amendment adding the extra $300,000, which did not have the same expert support, was unanimously shot down.
In another decision from the Council’s Tuesday meeting, the Citizens Police Review Board will be losing some of its watchdog duties.
The Council voted 4-2 in favor of limiting the CPRB’s responsibilities, so it abides by a new law that restricts the power of such boards. The dissenting votes came from Council members Nick Foster and Roy Lovelady.
City Counselor Nancy Thompson said the vote is an effort to avoid complaints that the CPRB was overstepping its authority.
“Worst case scenario, there’s a challenge that shuts down the operations of CPRB. Best case scenario is nothing happens and we move on,” Thompson said.
Thompson said the city’s attorneys tried to preserve as much of the CPRB’s power as possible, though not all Council members agreed that the new state law mandated changes.
An influence on Foster and Lovelady’s dissenting votes came from the testimony of State Representative David Tyson Smith (D-Columbia), who urged council members to keep the existing board rules in place, saying his hometown wasn’t the bill’s target.
“I don’t believe that the reading of this absolutely requires we make changes. I can tell you that the intent of the legislature was not to get at what we’re doing here in Columbia, it’s more designed to people who are overreaching in St. Louis,” Smith said.
The Council members who voted for the measure took a more conservative approach. Council member Betsy Peters initially wanted to table the discussion to a later date, but was in favor of the measure after the vote to table failed.
“I do hope the state legislature is able to clarify this so that we would feel comfortable going back to the way the board has previously worked,” Peters said. “But I’m not really willing to put the board in limbo or really put us at risk.”
Ultimately, the Council voted to limit the CPRB to investigating claims about police conduct made by citizens. Additionally, it can no longer initiate its own programming or inquiries.
