Brilliant at the Basics: Why Public Safety Gets Funded First

The mission of county government is to provide best-in-class public safety and public infrastructure. That’s it — the whole list.

County government has a narrow mission, and if we are brilliant at the basics — if we fund those two things, execute on them, and stay focused on them — Platte County government can succeed at its core function. Everything else is downstream of getting these right.

Platte County public safety is the first of those two priorities. It should also be the first line of every county budget we write. Not because the other work doesn’t matter, but because a community that isn’t safe can’t be anything else first.

Attract. Retain. Equip. Train. Support.

Public safety isn’t a line item you fund once and check off. It’s people. Our deputies, our officers, our prosecutors and our first responders do a job most of us would never want. They spend their days dealing with the parts of society the rest of us get to look away from. They deserve a county government that has their backs — and that support has to show up in the budget, not just in speeches.

It starts with talent. We have to attract the best people we can to serve, and we have to retain the best people once they’re here. 

Attracting talent and losing it a year later is not a workforce — it’s a turnstile. That means real, competitive compensation. It means we stop treating law enforcement pay as the place we look to save a few dollars, and start treating it as the investment that holds everything else up.

From there: equip and train. The best equipment we can put in their hands, and the best training available so they can use it well and safely. You can hire the right people and still fail them if you send them out under-resourced. We cannot allow that.

And then support — plainly and consistently. These are difficult jobs done under pressure, and the people doing them should never have to wonder whether the county government stands behind them. It does. It must.

Attract. Retain. Equip. Train. Support. That’s the standard for our public safety officials, and I mean to hold the county to it.

Fund the officers and fund the prosecutors. They’re partners.

Here’s where too many communities drop the ball. You can do everything right on the front end — attract great officers, train them, equip them, put them on the street — and still watch it all come apart at the courthouse. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a bad actor arrested and then released, not because they were innocent, but because the prosecuting office didn’t have the staffing to hold them accountable.

An arrest that doesn’t lead to accountability is a revolving door. And a revolving door tells every bad actor in the county exactly what they can get away with.

So the prosecuting office is not an afterthought — it’s the second half of the same job. We have to fund it so it can attract and retain the best prosecutors, and so it is staffed to actually carry its caseload. A prosecuting office forced to triage which crimes it has the capacity to pursue is a prosecuting office being asked to decide which victims matter. That’s not a position we should ever put them in.

Police work and prosecution are one system. When the arrest is made, the prosecutors have to have the ability and the staffing to see it through and hold that individual fully accountable. Period.

Funding Platte County public safety takes deliberate decisions.

None of this happens by accident, and it doesn’t happen by writing a budget that funds everything a little and nothing well. It takes deliberate choices by the commission — choices made in a clear order of priority.

So here’s the order I’ll fight for. First, fund public safety: the right number of officers, appropriately compensated, appropriately trained, appropriately equipped, and genuinely supported. Fund it fully. Then fully fund the prosecuting office as their partner in the same mission. Only after those two are truly funded do we work down the rest of the priority list — with public roads and bridges next, because that’s the other half of the county’s core mission, our public infrastructure.

We keep funding priorities in order until the budget is spent. And when we reach that line, that’s when we ask the honest questions: what else genuinely needs to be funded, and how are we going to pay for it — without reaching deeper into the taxpayer’s pocket, and without diverting the county’s money to interests that were never part of its mission.

That’s the job.

That’s what being brilliant at the basics looks like:  Fund the mission. Execute the mission. Stay focused on the mission. Take care of the people who keep us safe, give their partners in the prosecutor’s office the ability to hold bad actors accountable, and then take care of the roads and bridges we all depend on. Do those things well, in that order, on purpose — and everything else about this county gets easier.

That’s county government doing its job. And a county government doing its job is what makes this a safer place to live and raise a family.