Believe it or not, journalists generally prefer writing about good news, even if we often plaster the bad stuff across the front pages of our newspapers.
W e cover stories involving conflict and problems because they’re important and should be of interest to readers, but we don’t put them there without pain, sometimes.
The week before last was particularly bad – the brutal financial body blow dealt our local government by unexpectedly low tax revenues from the county and resulting compression, the recovery of a suicide victim’s body, and the flare-up of the contract disagreement between the city and its cops that was headed to an arbitration hearing.
The latter, in particular, was starting to shape up to be nasty enough to bring back memories of some of the disfunctional government and bad blood that occurred a few years ago down the road in Lebanon.
The good news this week, though, is that the police employees have decided that they didn’t want to go there and agreed to a deal the city could live with. Subject to a union vote that was to occur Tuesday, after we went to press this week, and approval by the City Council, the tentative agreement reached last week would establish a contract through 2013 (See particulars on page 1.)
We commend the cops for that. They have, indeed taken one for the city – not the politicians and administrators, but the people of Sweet Home. We should be grateful.
This isn’t over. Everybody, including the police chief who bore the brunt of much of the union’s ire reported in last week’s edition, agrees that our cops are underpaid. When this two-year contract expires they will likely be even more underpaid than they are now, compared to similar-sized communities throughout Oregon.
The bad news for the cops is that they are also losing two experienced employees, whose departure is the first noticeable impact of the city’s financial woes. (Particulars also start on page 1.)
We need to find a way to fund our police services at a reasonable level so that our officers are paid at a fair, competitive rate.
We appreciate that the League of Oregon Cities is taking note of our plight here in Sweet Home, where we are forced by state law to be far more dependent on temporary levies to fund our law enforcement than nearly any other community in the state.
We hope they can come up with some workable answers.
However, the issues aren’t just Sweet Home’s. The Sheriff’s Office is also taking it in the chops from the reductions in land values that have resulted in the compression we’ve experienced.
We’ve alluded previously to the problems and inequities Sweet Home experiences in funding both its own police and more than our share of Sheriff’s Office services in county. Those problems need to be fixed and, whether it is a split rate or some other mechanism that will help both the county and the city, it needs to happen soon.
Meanwhile, we need to make sure our police officers know we appreciate their willingness to sacrifice for the good of the community in a tough time.