By Jeremy M. Lazarus

Mayor Dwight C. Jones is preparing to throw a curveball into Richmond’s increasingly heated campaigns for city offices.

At a time when polls show city residents want more city tax dollars invested in the public schools, and when most candidates are vying to outdo rivals in portraying themselves as education-friendly, the lame duck mayor, who leaves office Dec. 31, is calling for a big share of excess city funds to be shifted to crime fighting.

In a proposal he is expected to introduce to Richmond City Council on Monday, Mayor Jones will urge the governing body to endorse his plan to fuel a major expansion of the police department to a record strength of 800 sworn officers, up from the current authorized force of 750 sworn officers.

In a Sept. 26 letter to the council outlining his plan, the mayor pushed aside education as the bedrock of the community’s future.

Instead, he wrote that “public safety is the foundation upon which everything else rests in a resurgent city like ours,” including public education, poverty mitigation and restaurant and business growth. “All of these hallmarks require that our strong public safety commitment continues.”

However, Mayor Jones also acknowledged he has no idea where the steady stream of dollars would come from to cover the projected $5.6 million annual cost for the new officers.

Instead, he wants permission to cobble together about $3.6 million in available spare dollars to start the process. Then he would leave it to the next City Council and his successor to figure out how to pay for the expansion on an ongoing basis.

He wrote that he recognizes that most of his plan is supported by one-time funding that would require “future allocation of resources.”

“However,” he continued, “this action is necessary to address the immediate, critical public safety needs … of our community.”

Whether the City Council will go along with his plan remains to be seen, particularly at a time when every department is screaming for more resources and most city workers have gone years without a pay increase.

Indeed, the financial squeeze is so acute that the council is expected to maintain the current real estate tax rate of $1.20 per $100 of assessed rate, instead of rolling back the rate to $1.18 per $100 to reflect rising property values. It’s essentially a tax increase, but the extra $4.5 million that is projected to be generated was built into the current budget.

Richmond already spends heavily on public safety. While education is still far and away No. 1 in the budget in receiving a $145 million contribution from city taxpayers, the police department ranks second at $87.5 million. That is more than is spent on social services and parks and recreation combined.

Mayor Jones’ proposal calls for adding 70 new officers within the next year. The first step, the mayor stated, would be to allow the police department to bring on a class of 20 recruits this fall at a cost of $1.6 million, using $860,000 the city received from a utilities agreement with Rocketts Landing and a projected $740,000 in savings on health care costs.

He also wants to use about half of a projected $4.5 million surplus from the 2016 fiscal year that ended June 30 to pay for a second class of 25 police recruits next spring.

Finally, he proposes that the city allow the police department to add a third class of 25 recruits in the fall of 2017, although he could offer no source of funds to cover the $2 million cost for that class.

The mayor’s proposal essentially embraces a plan recently presented to him by Police Chief Alfred Durham. The chief has spent months publicly and privately decrying the city’s failure to give the police department the resources needed and leaving Chief Durham with what he calls an increasingly undermanned department.

The chief also has generated extensive media coverage about the number of resignations and retirements that have left the department struggling to ensure an adequate number of officers are available to patrol or detectives to investigate criminal activity.

The officers are overworked and increasingly stressed in trying to keep up with the demand for service, Chief Durham repeatedly has said, citing increasing numbers of officers leaving for other jobs with better pay and working conditions.

Meanwhile, he argues he has been asked to take on more and more services. In recent years, he said the department now offers 37 community service and youth support programs that need to be staffed.

At the same time, he wants at least 23 officers to fill office positions now held by civilians. Currently, about 17 percent of the department’s 885-member staff are civilian workers.

For Chief Durham, the main need for more police officers is the growth in the city’s population, which has jumped by an estimated 10,000 people since 2010. To him, more people mean more service calls, requiring more officers to respond.

However, the chief has had to walk a delicate line in making that argument given that the department’s own reports show that crime has fallen in the city despite the increase in population.

That information can be found in an annual report that the Virginia State Police produces called “Crime in Virginia,” which is based on data from every law enforcement agency.

According to the 2015 report, the most recent available, Richmond had 20,921 criminal incidents that year, or 9,599 crimes per 100,000 residents. And it deployed 732 sworn officers.

That compares with 2007, when Richmond reported nearly 24,000 incidents, or 12,256 crimes per 100,000 residents. At that time, the department deployed 30 fewer officers and 25,000 fewer people lived in the city.

Mayor Jones insists that more officers are needed to deal with a recent rise in crime, particularly homicides. In his letter to City Council, the mayor noted that “Richmond has had 45 homicides in 2016, three more than we had the entire last year.”

“We must remain vigilant to address any uptick in crime that we experience … and dedicate the necessary resources to combat this rise in homicides,” he wrote.

Aside from pumping more funds into the police department, the mayor stated in his letter that he also wants to use the remaining $2.25 million from the 2016 surplus to fix city alleys, beef up the city’s fund that covers storm cleanup and cover part of the school system’s unpaid storm water bill.

Under his plan, Public Works would receive $562,500 to conduct another alley improvement blitz and another $562,500 for the Major Storm Special Fund to enable the city to better deal with weather events, like the major summer storm that knocked down trees across North Side.

The mayor also proposes to shift $1.12 million to Public Utilities to reduce the $2.1 million Richmond Public Schools owes to the city’s storm water utility.