By Patti Epler
The Arizona Guardian

State public safety officials are warning of dire and devastating consequences if the state agency is forced to take a 15 percent cut to its already reduced budget.

If the cuts are made -- which legislative leaders are already saying is unlikely -- the state Department of Public Safety would need to save about $40 million primarily through laying off hundreds of patrol officers, investigators, crime lab personnel and support staff, according to the 62-page document submitted Friday to the governor's office.

The state is at least $1.5 billion short in balancing the current $8.6 billion budget. Gov. Jan Brewer asked all state agencies to prepare 15 percent budget-cut scenarios in the event the Legislature decides to balance the budget through cuts, rather than finding new sources of revenue or other means.

The governor has been urging lawmakers to ask voters to approve a three-year, 1-cent increase in the state's sale tax, estimated to bring in about $1 billion a year.

"If fully implemented, the (cuts) would be devastating to the Department, public safety and to our employees," DPS director Roger Vanderpool wrote in a two-page letter to Eileen Klein, the governor's budget director.

In a press release sent out Friday shortly after the budget cut documents were made public, Vanderpool said as many as 570 positions could be lost, equal to the size of the entire Tempe Police Department.

Cuts of that magnitude would "certainly send a message to drug and human smuggling cartels that Arizona is 'open territory,' " the press release says. "In addition, motorists in outlying areas of the state would essentially be 'on their own' should they become involved in a serious collision or have their vehicle break down. In areas where officers may remain, collision response times would be greatly impacted."

The DPS document, which the governor's office calls a "data collection tool and not a proposed budget solution," starts with small-ticket items like eliminating sex offender monitoring, escorts for wide loads and school bus inspections.

The top brass at DPS also is willing to take a 5 percent pay cut before rank-and-file officers are lost, the document says.

Overtime pay could be cut by 60 percent for a savings of $2.8 million but that would mean fewer arrests and traffic citations issued, among other crime-enforcement losses.

The Gang and Immigration Intelligence Team Enforcement Mission (GIITEM) could quit providing money to numerous other law enforcement agencies that make up the statewide task force, saving $2.6 million. But that would have a "significant impact" on human smuggling and drug enforcement. Other agencies, also suffering from financial problems, may be "unable to re-absorb their officers and would likely doom the GIITEM model for the foreseeable future," the document says.

The department also looked at saving millions more by eliminating or reducing  immigration personnel, other gang enforcement efforts, the SWAT team, accident and criminal investigators, crime lab staffing and emergency dispatchers.

But the biggest single pot -- $11.5 million -- would have to come from cutting highway patrol jobs, eliminating about one-third of the positions currently in that division, going from a vacancy factor of 12 percent to 31 percent. The document puts the number at 182 sworn positions plus 4 support positions.

The document notes that DPS is expecting to receive $7 million in settlement money from a multi-state legal case in conjunction with the Attorney General's office. The money was initially envisioned to go to beef up border investigations but DPS now wants it to go to offset personnel reductions. If the money is not allowed for that purpose, the document warns, staffing cuts would be much higher, air rescue facilities in Flagstaff and Tucson would be shut down and the crime lab in Lake Havasu City would be closed.

"It's beyond scary, isn’t it?" said John Ortolano, president of DPS' Fraternal Order of Police. "As a police officer and a citizen I am gravely concerned about what's going to happen if these cuts take place."

He said his phone "has been ringing non-stop" from DPS employees who are worried about losing their jobs and possibly having to uproot families to find other work.

Ortolano noted that DPS has been running on a bare minimum budget for some time. It takes longer for officers to get to accident or crime scenes, they're driving vehicles that are wearing out and using out-dated gear.

People don't understand "why we can't get a highway patrol unit out there or send a rescue helicopter or even process evidence from a crime scene," he said. "It just baffles me that people aren't aware of this" budget crisis.