Police and fire departments’ staffing draws concern at Costa Mesa town-hall meeting
About 90 people packed into the Neighborhood Community Center on Thursday night for a town-hall meeting examining public safety issues in Costa Mesa.
The upshot of the forum, sponsored by the community activist group Costa Mesans for Responsible Government, is that the lack of proper staffing in the city’s fire and police departments is taking a toll on emergency responders, and making it harder to effectively combat crime in the city.
As speaker Mary Spadoni put it: “We are understaffed and ‘over-crimed.’”
Another speaker during the almost-two-hour forum, Ralph Taboada, said staffing hasn’t gone up along with the increasing number of calls for emergency services.
Taboada, who serves on the city’s Pension Oversight Committee, compared the situation to a business. With demand for service up, he said, a business owner should think, “I’d better add some people” to address it.
Part of the staffing equation is being able to retain officers and firefighters long-term. Two retired Costa Mesa public safety officials — police Lt. Clay Epperson and fire Deputy Chief Fred Seguin — said Thursday that they believe Costa Mesa’s departments have become less of a destination and more of a training ground in recent years.
“Guys are getting their foot in the door, they’re coming here and once they have a name for themselves, they’re reaching out and going to other venues,” Seguin said.
Some speakers, including Epperson, said they think the council majority has created an environment where it’s more difficult to retain public safety employees.
Also discussed at Thursday’s forum were sober-living homes, which house recovering drug and/or alcohol addicts.
Proponents say such homes can be vital cogs in the cycle of addiction treatment.
“I can tell you at this moment in time, right now, just in the county of Orange, there are 300,000 individuals that are suffering from a diagnosable and treatable disease known as addiction,” said Robert Mann, chairman of the Orange County Sober Living Coalition.
Providing effective treatment is vital, speakers said, because statistics show people who abuse substances are more likely to commit crimes.
Critics of the homes, however, say they can be disruptive to neighborhoods, contributing to parking problems, undue amounts of noise and second-hand cigarette smoke, among other ill effects.
The City Council has approved regulations aimed at curbing the sober-living homes’ proliferation, but those actions have attracted legal challenges.
Local resident Teresa Drain said the city “cannot fight all sober-living housing because we will lose in the courts as well as fail to be compassionate.”
“We need to make that sure our representatives are not electioneering and enacting ordinances willy-nilly,” she added.
Twitter: @LukeMMoney
