{"id":21823,"date":"2016-02-13T06:34:32","date_gmt":"2016-02-13T14:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/?p=21823"},"modified":"2016-02-13T06:34:32","modified_gmt":"2016-02-13T14:34:32","slug":"letter-to-the-editor-re-smpd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/?p=21823","title":{"rendered":"Letter to the Editor re: SMPD"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Posted 2\/13\/16 &#8211;<\/em> We have recently heard in the press that several members of the Sierra Madre Police Department have left to take jobs elsewhere, leaving our force short.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t blame them for a minute.\u00a0 As someone who works for a living, I understand perfectly.\u00a0 Some people are advocating that we should slash the utility tax, which essentially provides the money for police services, and a lot of other things.\u00a0 Some people are advocating that we switch our police service to the Sheriff&#8217;s Department.\u00a0 Both of these ideas are false economies.\u00a0\u00a0 Without the utility tax we do not have the money for a huge percentage of our budget including police, no matter where we get it from.\u00a0 My bet is that when we look at the number quoted by the Sheriff it is for only bare bones service, and that at any level, the level we are accustomed to or any other level, the Sheriff would cost at least 25% more than our own department, as well as being less satisfactory to most Sierra Madre residents.\u00a0 As\u00a0 Pogo so famously said, &#8220;We have met the enemy and it is us&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Eric Olson<br \/>\nSierra Madre<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Posted 2\/13\/16 &#8211; We have recently heard in the press that several members of the Sierra Madre Police Department have left to take jobs elsewhere, leaving our force short.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t blame them for a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13],"tags":[103],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21823"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sierramadrenews.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}