Guess what’s happening in Lompoc, again?
I know. You’re sick of hearing about that damn City Council and its bickering. But would you believe the 2019-21 budget debate that we thought was finally settled reared its stubborn little head again on Oct. 15? It’s the stupidity that just won’t quit.
This time around, Mayor Jenelle Osborne basically blamed the recent deadly shootings in Lompoc on cuts made to the public safety budget.
“We made decisions with our budget that did have an impact on public safety,” Osborne said.
Only thing is, money doesn’t make violence go away. Yeah, maybe Lompoc could put more cops out on the street, but the Lompoc Police Department is having trouble filling the positions that it can pay for—much less the ones that the city can’t pay for.
Although, Councilmember Jim Mosby was quick to defend the City Council’s budget cut decisions that he manhandled into existence. He was also quick to blame the police department for its own budget woes, saying that police officers got a 9 percent raise just a few short years ago, and it came at the expense of holding three positions vacant.
Yeah, shame on you for getting a raise, police officers! One of the reasons for that raise is because Lompoc needed to hang on to the officers it had, so they wouldn’t leave for another police department that paid more. Better to have vacant positions than a vacant police department, huh?
But I digress. Shootings have been happening in Lompoc for longer than the past two months, Osborne! And they’ve been happening for longer than it took ya’ll tongue-waggers to bicker a budget into submission.
In addition to the shooting death of a 15-year-old on Oct. 12 that resulted in two other injuries and the September shooting death of a soldier home on leave: On Aug. 8, a 26-year-old gunshot victim showed up to the hospital after he heard multiple shots and was hit in the shoulder by a bullet. The Lompoc Police Department investigated a spree of three gang-related shootings in as many weeks in April. A teenager was killed by a stray bullet in March. Two separate shootings happened on the same night last November, injuring a 16-year-old.
This list could go on, unfortunately.
I don’t think this is a funding problem. It sounds like a youth violence problem, one that the city of Lompoc should be addressing, starting with elected officials who should be troubleshooting solutions. Not bickering about the budget. That conversation is over; it’s time to move on.
Let’s go back to that conversation that started in 2018 about the city’s rising crime rates, where community members complained about an uptick in property crimes and vagrancy. If you see an uptick in gun violence, what are you going to do about it?
If you’re the police chief, hopefully you’re thinking about something similar to what Councilmember Gilda Cordova expressed at the Oct. 15 meeting.
“I would love to at some point in time turn our focus into what we’re going to do to make that money to make this community a better place,” Cordova said.
I hear there’s a grant for that.
The Canary is sick of the budget. Send comments to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 24-31, 2019.