Budget Problems Keep Bringing Santa Paula’s Adair Back to Earth

SANTA PAULA —  Police Chief Walt Adair admits that sometimes he would rather be flying than handling the delicate financial and political matters of the local force.

The 30-year police veteran--an avid flier who spends his vacation days ferrying planes around the world for a local company--has hit a little turbulence recently over the state of the Santa Paula Police Department.

But Adair, who says he is not one to back down from a challenge, has no immediate plans to start flying planes for a living.

“Yes, I’m coming to the point where I’m closing down a career, but I’m not retiring yet,” Adair said. “You can say that I think about my retirement and I’m looking forward to it, but I haven’t made any decision about when I’m going or what I’ll be doing.”

Born in Santa Paula, the 53-year-old Adair has been involved in local law enforcement since starting as a reserve officer in 1964. He was hired full time in August 1967 after attending Ventura College and then getting a bachelors degree from the University of Redlands.

He has moved up the ranks, from patrol officer to investigations and administration. In 1987, after attending the state’s command college for two years, Adair became police chief.

Adair has been flying even longer, since 1961 when he learned to handle a plane at the local airport.

And it has been those two passions--flying and police work--along with his family, that have ruled Adair’s life.

After he got out of the Navy in the early 1960s, Adair tried but could not land a job in aviation. So he settled on law enforcement.

“I like flying for the same reason that I like police work,” he said, dressed in a leather bomber jacket and sitting in his small corner office in the police station. “No shift is ever the same, and it’s always a challenge.”

On the walls of his sparse office are department portraits, photos of planes he has flown and pictures of his family.

He met his wife, Linda, when he was a reserve officer and she a waitress at a local burger joint, and they married 31 years ago. They have two children--Mike, a veteran Oxnard police officer, and Misty, who works as comptroller for a hotel in Agoura Hills.

One of five city police chiefs in the county, Adair, like his fellow chiefs, spends much of his day wrestling with budgets and juggling the demands of personnel, the City Council and the public.

With 29 sworn officers, Santa Paula is the second-smallest department in the county, and its officers are the lowest-paid overall, said Adair, who earns a base salary of about $78,000 a year.

Although an entry-level police officer in Santa Paula makes about $33,400 a year--slightly more than the entry-level salary for sheriff’s deputies--total compensation packages are much lower, officials said.

According to statistics compiled last March by the local police union, Santa Paula officers make 34% less in compensation than officers in Oxnard, 31% less than officers in Simi Valley, 19% less than sheriff’s deputies and 12% less than officers in Port Hueneme, the county’s smallest police department.

The Santa Paula Police Department was the only department in the county that actually saw its budget drop last year, decreasing by about $40,000 to a little more than $3 million a year.

As a result, much of his workload is now taken up in budget meetings with other city administrators looking for ways to raise more money for his department.

Along with those challenges, Adair has been riding out some recent criticism of the state of his department.

A committee called the Public Safety Strategy Team--referred to by police and residents by the acronym PSST--released a report last year saying there was low morale on the force and that 12 police officers are considering leaving.

But Adair said that some members of the group blew the situation out of proportion when they recommended that the city eliminate the Police Department and contract with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department for police services, like the cities of Fillmore, Ojai, Moorpark, Camarillo and Thousand Oaks do.

“I really do not think that’s a good idea,” Adair said.

Although four of the five cities with the lowest police costs per resident are patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department, comparisons with those cities are not fair, Adair said.

Santa Paula has a higher crime rate--the second-highest in the county behind Oxnard--and is a poorer community than those cities, he said.

The rule of thumb is that law-enforcement costs increase with crime rates. And crime is often tied to factors outside law enforcement’s control, such as poverty, education, out-of-town traffic and street alignment, Adair said.

It would not be fair to compare Santa Paula, which spends about $109 per resident each year for police services, with Moorpark, which spends about $97 per resident, because Moorpark has one of the lowest crime rates in the country, he said.

A fairer comparison would be with Fillmore, Adair said, where residents pay about $123 a year for police services.

Adair said that turning to the Sheriff’s Department could be even more expensive.

“I really don’t think they could do it cheaper, and really I don’t think we as a city want to give up control,” Adair said. “It’s part of the American spirit to say, ‘we can do it better ourselves.’ ”

“Once you give up control, you never get it back,” he said.

Others point out other advantages of having a department of Santa Paula’s size that is close to the community: Most of the officers grew up in the city, and they still live there.

“I call it the fishbowl effect,” said Cmdr. Bob Gonzales. “We know most of victims and the bad guys already.”

Although most City Council members would like to keep local control of law enforcement, some feel that the criticisms of the department logged in the PSST report need to be addressed.

“I don’t think we’re in any crisis, but I do think it has brought an awareness that we have a lot of room for improvement,” said Councilwoman Laura Espinosa.

Although Espinosa gives Adair high marks for how well he deals with the public, she said that he has, at times, waited too long to attack problems.

“We need creative ideas so that we can solve these things before they become problems,” she said.

Adair took another hit recently when a survey of police officers by the interim city manager revealed that many of them see the chief as a distant administrator who is uninvolved or uninterested in their day-to-day police work, said Det. Gary Marshall, who heads the local police union.

That survey also indicated that Adair and his top managers need to do a better job communicating with their officers, Marshall said.

“We feel inundated and overwhelmed at times,” said Marshall, who is one of three detectives at the department.

The city went for two years without a murder and then was hit late last year with three murders in less than two months, he said. Almost immediately the small detective bureau was overwhelmed and had to ask for assistance from the district attorney’s office and the Sheriff’s Department.

Adair answers that he is very sympathetic to his officers’ workload and morale and that he is trying to get more officers and to raise pay.

“The fact is, we need money to solve a lot of these problems,” he said.

He may seem remote to some of his officers, he said, because, in his effort to bolster the department’s budget, he has been wrapped up in helping to revise the city’s General Plan--looking at everything from proposed housing developments to ways to attract new businesses.

“I’m dealing more with community issues than crime issues,” he said.

Growth and development could generate a tax base that will help support a better-paid and larger police force, he said.

Adair and the other department heads are also in serious discussion about asking voters to approve some sort of tax--possibly a utility tax--that would generate money for the general fund and for law enforcement.

City Councilman Jim Garfield said that finding more money for police services is important, but it is not the only issue.

“Throwing money at the problem isn’t the only solution,” Garfield said. “I think other issues have come out that can be easily solved just by changing how the department works.”

Garfield said Adair is trying to add a community service officer to the department, which would free up officers from having to deal with smaller tasks such as traffic reports on minor fender benders.

Adair also hopes to come up with money in the next budget to pay for two more officers, to replace three patrol cars and to pay for training for the department’s high-risk entry team.

So much hinges on the budget that Adair said his time spent working in the mundane world of finance is just as important as the time he spends dealing with the problems of gangs, drugs and violence.

“You get the level of law enforcement that you can afford, and I want the best I can get for Santa Paula,” Adair said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

About This Series

This is the first in a series about Ventura County’s five city police chiefs. Over the next several weeks, “The Chiefs: Profiles of Ventura County’s Top Cops” will look at the common concerns of the county’s local law enforcement leaders, as well as the issues that make the departments and their chiefs unique.