New Police Chief Speaks on the Budget

Todd Cusimano took over as chief of the Twin Cities Police Authority in August 2010 following the retirement of Phil Green, who had been at the helm since 1980. Cusimano, 38, had served 15 years under Green and for part of time served alongside his own father, Sgt. Gary Cusimano. The younger Cusimano oversees 34 sworn officers, 44 total employees and an annual budget of about $6.5 million. We caught up with him recently to ask how things are going and what 2011 holds for his department.

Larkspur Patch: Can you talk about the fiscal challenges you've had to face so far and what it looks like in the future?

Todd Cusimano: Going back to the 2008-09 fiscal budget, we saw things happening. Luckily in the Twin Cities the property taxes have held the line and been pretty strong. The town of Corte Madera has been hit pretty hard with sales taxes because they have so much more retail, so it's pretty devastating. All that affects our budget.

Our budget was $7.3 million back then, so we started freezing positions when they came open. Since then we froze six positions — a dispatcher, two community service officers and three police officer positions — and we've also made cuts to our budget. We cut about $650,000 in the 2008-09 budget, which was about 9-10 percent of our budget. Since that point we've continued to hold our budget at $6.7 million to the present and we will continue that going into 2011.

Larkspur Patch: Passing the 2008 bond measure for a new facility must have been big for Twin Cities police. Since then there's been talk of consolidation of police departments, possibly with Ross Valley agencies. What's the latest on that?

Todd Cusimano: Looking into the future, one of the exciting things for us was the passage of that measure, which gave . That will be constructed at end of 2011, and that has given us possibility to look at our friends and maybe share some services. Maybe we'd be looking at sharing dispatching or some other positions. The idea would be to enhance the services we provide the community but also to save them money. I'm really spending a lot of time on that now.

I don't want to talk about any particular names yet because it's very political and a very difficult thing to discuss. I'll tell you that since 1980 we were the only consolidated department between two cities in the state. We're all about it, and we're going to have to do something if we're going to continue to offer the highest quality of police work. I think we have to do something sharing, some regionalizing, if we're going to be successful. We've had over 15 agencies in last 18 months come in and evaluate our model and take a close look at our JPA. We have a good resume and we're going to see how it works. I'm thinking at a minimum, let's share some services. But again, it's very political.

Larkspur Patch: What's your impression of the police authority's image in the community?

Todd Cusimano: When we did our Measure E bond measure study, we did surveys and asked the public to tell us about our strengths and weaknesses. Believe it or not, we had 87 percent tells us our service was good or outstanding. The company that did the survey told us that it was one of highest approval percentages in the state that they've ever seen.

Chief Green's philosophy and the way employees handle themselves in the community has been working, but there's more we can do. We can still look at what we can do better. I think we can use communication and technology to reach out to the community better. One part is using our website and everything other method we can to get our message out to share information. I think we have good relationship with our community. I'm lucky that they're very supportive, and that's one of the reasons why I took this job.