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Board approves immigration funding
After a two-week delay, the Prince William Board of County Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to fund the Police Department's efforts to crack down on illegal immigrants.
Last year, supervisors ordered Police Chief Charlie Deane to come up with a plan to identify and detain illegal immigrants so they could be deported.
In response, Deane created a Criminal Alien Unit in his department; a team of five officers and one civilian who will focus on processing illegal immigrants.
The team began training last month but they were not new employees; rather, they were members of the police force who were taken from their existing jobs and retrained instead as CAU officers.
Board of County Supervisors Chairman Corey Stewart (R-at large) explained before Tuesday's meeting that transferring those employees means that there is a hole on the force that needs to be filled.
On Tuesday, the board gave the Police Department an additional $793,425 to hire five new officers and one new civilian to fill the positions left vacant by the transfer. That sum also includes money for extra equipment and an outside evaluation of the new immigration crackdown.
Supervisors had intended to vote on the budget appropriation earlier in the month but Gainesville Supervisor John Stirrup (R), a leader in the immigration crackdown movement, was absent from that meeting. A decision was delayed for two weeks to allow him to vote on the matter.
Though the supervisors all voted in favor of the expenditure, they did engage in a brief argument over language.
An amended version of the resolution stated that “the Criminal Alien Unit is dependent upon full staffing” in order for the department to prioritize immigration enforcement.
Stirrup asked that the sentence be removed but Occoquan Supervisor Mike May (R) asked that it be put back in. Coles Supervisor Marty Nohe (R) sided with May and Stewart sided with Stirrup.
Stirrup maintained that immigration enforcement is a priority whether or not the department is fully funded.
County Executive Craig Gerhart, however, said that without full funding, immigration will not be treated as a priority.
For instance, Gerhart said, an officer may be questioning a suspect about his immigration status when a call goes out about a robbery or burglary. Without full funding of the force, the department may not have enough officers to respond to everything that happens at once. Then, he said, the officer is going to drop the immigration suspect to respond instead to the robbery, which is a higher priority.
“It's one thing to say we're fully funding something, but if we can't do the work, we haven't fully funded it,” he said.
In the end, the supervisors agreed to leave in the “dependent upon” language because that part of the resolution isn't legally binding; it is simply justification for the appropriation of funds.
The money for the program comes from the county's contingency reserve fund, a pot of about $800,000 that is used for serious problems, but not life-or-death emergencies.
The county has two reserve funds, Gerhart said. The first is the general fund balance, which is only to be used in the event of a “Katrina-type disaster,” Gerhart explained earlier this month. The other fund, the contingency reserve, is kept for “relatively small but critical” projects. For instance, in an unusually harsh winter, the cost of clearing county parking lots may be higher than expected, he said. It could also be used as matching funds for grants that turn up unexpectedly or for budget shortfalls in key areas.
While it is “certainly unusual” to use that money to create a new program, like the Criminal Alien Unit, in the middle of a budget cycle, it can be done, he said.
Next week, Gerhart and his staff will present the first draft of their budget for the coming fiscal year, which is expected to include six new police officers, in addition to the ones paid for on Tuesday.
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