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Tom Wibert, East Lansing Police Chief:

Good afternoon, my name is Tom Wibert, and I am the chief of police in East Lansing. Today at a little after noon, I received an email from the executive director from the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police, encouraging me to express my concern to my local legislator down here at the capitol. That email went out to every single police chief in Michigan. Little did I know that at 5:30 PM I would be the one down here talking to you all about it.

Our concern, in East Lansing, is that a shutdown in the State government would be catastrophic. Twenty percent of the city's funding comes from revenue sharing; sixty percent of the city's budget goes towards public safety. Therefore, if there's a cut in revenue sharing where the money suddenly stops-the money that's already in the budget-suddenly stops, it would be catastrophic for us.

We've already been cutting. For six years we've been cutting, along with the state. We've cut training to the point now where we're only doing certification-only training, unless it's driven by a grant. We've cut equipment now; we're driving extremely old cars, or unmarked cars; some of them are seven years old, which is extremely old for the hard use that they get.

Our police department is shrinking. On September 11, 2001, we had sixty seven officers. We're down to sixty two now. That's about an eight percent drop. Statewide, we have one thousand six hundred less police officers than we did six years ago.

And so, this is a case of local governments have already been cutting. And the only thing left to cut now is staffing. And so, any cut to revenue sharing would be a huge problem for us, and I'm just one local community. And that's what we hope to do is... You know, there's Republicans, and there's Democrats, but everybody has a hometown. And what we want everybody to do is to put their partisanship aside, and get together, and think of their hometown, think of the public safety of their constituents, and solve this problem.