Ball State University remains safe, even as the city of Muncie cuts police and fire services in a bid to plug a budget shortfall of $3.8 million, campus and city officials say.
"We're still going to provide fire protection to the university, and I believe we supplement the police department at Ball State," Mayor Sharon McShurley said.
Police officers and firefighters account for 79 percent of the city's general fund, McShurley said in an interview last week.
The mayor said she ordered the police and fire departments to each cut their budgets by $1 million. As part of the budget cutting, the city laid off 32 firefighters, and a report last week in The Star Press of Muncie said the mayor had ordered the firing of five rookie police officers.
However, McShurley said she had not ordered police layoffs but instead thought that the savings could be made up by cutting benefits, such as increasing insurance deductibles to $3,000 for the police department and increasing employee premiums by 25 percent.
"We're going to have $3.8 million less to operate on," she said of the city budget.
"I believe concessions in the [police] union contract are one way to get there," McShurley said. "We have not ordered those layoffs yet."
Part of the budget-cutting debate headed for court last week. The Star Press reported that the firefighter's union sued the city on Friday, claiming that the 32 laid-off firefighters were wrongfully terminated. The union is seeking a court order to reinstate the employees until the city Board of Public Works and Safety, which the union says has authority over the department, is given a chance to act.
In the meantime, the Muncie mayor and Ball State's Director of Public Safety Gene Burton insisted in separate interviews that the police and fire cutbacks would not threaten campus safety.
"We're going to continue to provide public safety to the community, and we're going to make adjustments to the revenue and still have a safe community to live in," McShurley said.
Burton said his university police department would make whatever adjustments were necessary if city police patrols were changed.
"We have our patrol area, and I don't anticipate that that will change," he said.
"We'll continue to work with the city police as we are now," Burton said. "For the short term, I don't think that it will cause any change in operation in our department."
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