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Coats' silly scare tactics

In print: Sunday, July 27, 2008

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A cynical public suspects governments are not honest about how much money they have or how they spend it. Pinellas County Sheriff Jim Coats is feeding that cynicism by playing political games during budget deliberations.

In a performance worthy of an Oscar, Coats declared to county commissioners in May that the streets would be "littered with human carnage" and "law-abiding citizens will become prisoners in their own home" if commissioners forced him to reduce his proposed $261-million budget for next year by 10 percent.

Though the budget year does not begin until Oct. 1, Coats announced immediate layoffs and threatened to eliminate or reduce popular programs such as community policing, DUI enforcement and sexual offender tracking. Valuable programs to help juveniles and jail inmates get back on the straight and narrow also would be lost. And Coats said when doom descends on Pinellas, citizens should point their fingers at the county commissioners, not him.

Coats may have been counting on an outraged public to demand that the county guarantee full funding to his department. There was some of that, but times have changed. Critics of Coats' attitude emerged. Among them were taxpayers who voted for Amendment 1 and thought it was not unreasonable for even law enforcement agencies to operate more efficiently.

Also among the critics are two veterans of the Sheriff's Office, Randall Jones and John Pikramenos, who are vying in the Aug. 26 Democratic primary for the opportunity to challenge Republican Coats in the Nov. 4 general election. The challengers and their supporters accused Coats of using scare tactics, wasting money on "toys" such as airplanes, and building an agency top heavy with high-paid officers and civilian administrators.

So perhaps it is no surprise that last week Coats announced he had miraculously found extra dollars in the Sheriff's Office kitty — $2.5-million in revenue from the U.S. Marshals Service for housing their prisoners in the county jail — and reached agreement with the county to roll over to next year $800,000 he didn't spend this fiscal year.

Voila! Crisis averted. Threatened programs will be restored and plans for additional layoffs have been shelved. And Coats, with apologies to county commissioners, acknowledged that his comment about carnage in the streets was an exaggeration. Of course, we knew that.

Whether the times are good or bad, whether his challenges as the county's top law enforcement officer are big or small, Coats should have a relationship with the public based on trust. His behavior during this budget season is not the way to earn it.