Barrie mayor calls cuts to police funding ‘ridiculous’

Barrie Mayor Jeff Lehman has taken to Facebook to share his frustration regarding what he calls “ridiculous” cuts to funding for the Barrie Police.

According to Lehman, on Friday the city received a letter from the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services indicating the grant for Barrie Police had been slashed.

“We received a letter Friday from the Ministry indicating they have cut our grant by $300,000, on top of cancelling the typical annual increase of $400,000 provided by the previous government,” Lehman wrote on Facebook on Sunday. “This means a $700,000 cut to public safety.”

“In the midst of an opioid crisis in which the Police are front line workers, it’s absolutely ridiculous that the Conservative Government would cut funding. Are you going to accept this?” he wrote. “I’m not.”

The slash in funding targets police serving as court security and prisoner transport officers at the provincial courthouse in Barrie.

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“It’s unfortunate the Mayor of Barrie is fear mongering and playing politics with public safety,” said Marion Ringuette, spokesperson for the Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services, in an email response. “The grant he is referring to is for Court Security Prisoner Transportation.”

According to Ringuette, funding is allocated based on each municipality’s relative share of the total court security transportation program costs across the province.

“For example, if a municipality’s cost represents one per cent of the total provincial court security prisoner transportation cost, then it will be allocated one per cent of the available funding,” Ringuette said. “This means the amount municipalities receive may vary from year to year.”

Ringuette says the grant program provides $125 million to qualifying municipalities based on information provided by the local police services, a number which he says did not change for 2019.

In Barrie, Lehman says the uploading of court security costs happened in roughly $400,000 installments annually, reaching a total of approximately $3 million last year.

“There was no guarantee this would continue past 2018, but the government committed to paying for court security costs, so municipal police forces could focus on all the other demands on them — like the opioid crisis, today,” Lehman wrote on Facebook on Monday.

And Lehman says the funding slash could have an effect on the public.

“This is why I’m upset — because we now have to find money elsewhere in the police budget. I don’t believe we can do that without affecting our service to the public,” he wrote. “And courthouse security is absolutely a public safety issue.”

The Barrie police declined to comment about the cuts to funding.