Motion to reject police budget fails

A motion to reject the Waterloo Regional Police budget and send it back to the police services board for further review has failed.

The motion was put forward by Regional Councillor Rob Deutschmann. 

It was debated during a 14 hour meeting of the region's planning and budget committee Wednesday.

The final vote was tied 8-8, so a tie vote means the motion does not pass.

Deutschmann had argued the region should not be paying for 19 new full-time officers that haven't even been hired yet.

“What I'm most opposed to is the fact they're asking us to pay on January 1, for police we haven't hired yet,” Deutschmann said in a previous interview, pointing out the additional funding would be retroactive to the start of 2023 despite no new officers having been hired.

“That's just not appropriate, we can't approve this budget and pay for essentially what is a ghost force; we don't even have these officers and they're wanting to be paid for them,” he said.

Deutschmann also raised unease over the budget process itself, given regional council will only now be getting a say after the proposed budget's already received final approval from the police services board.

Regional Chair Karen Redman was one of the eight members of regional council who voted against the motion.

“I guess colleagues, what I ask you, if you vote in favour of this and I will not vote in favour of this motion, what is your expectation? It isn't just that you are rejecting the budget, because there are two other pieces to this.” Redman said. ” … You are taking money from the police budget and you are saying it is being earmarked to upstream in community funding. So there is the connection, there is the binary conversation of we are taking money away from the police budget and we are going to now invest it in another way in the community. So that is the binary argument embedded in this motion.”

The regional budget will be approved on February 22.