| Governor's Oregon Principles Budget 2005-2007 |
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| Public Safety |
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Principle: Oregonians are safe in their homes, communities and in state institutions.
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Public safety is essential to our citizens. We must hold criminals accountable for their actions, prevent crime and reduce recidivism. We must also provide for safe buildings and places of work, prevent fraud and abuse, and maintain the ability to prepare for and swiftly respond to emergencies to preserve life and property.
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| Overview |
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Governor Kulongoski’s 2005-07 Recommended Budget covers a broad range of services from training law enforcement and emergency responders to incarcerating criminals. This budget reflects the Governor’s priority to keep Oregonians safe by ensuring law enforcement, local communities, and the military have the tools they need to prevent crime and provide security to Oregonians.
This budget enhances training for law enforcement and emergency responders in Oregon’s new public safety training facility. It creates a new Department of Homeland Security that will better enable the state to prevent, prepare for, and - if necessary - respond to and recover from terrorist attacks or natural disasters.
State Police will continue the traditional role of providing troopers on state highways in order to prevent loss of life from traffic accidents that result from drunk driving and other poor driving practices.
State Police will also play an active role in addressing Oregon’s methamphetamine epidemic, which is one of the state’s greatest public safety challenges. The budget creates a special statewide team to detect and investigate large methamphetamine operations throughout the state, with a particular focus on cracking down on operations that place the lives of children at risk. The enhancement of forensics services will also allow a faster and more accurate turnaround on criminal investigations.
In addition to forensics, the state’s public safety agencies are the only provider of a number of public safety-related services. This budget maintains funding for those services in order to make sure the entities they support have the resources they need to continue to do their job and keep Oregonians safe. These services include training law enforcement officers, and providing juvenile and adult secure custody. The budget expands Oregon’s correctional capacity to incarcerate almost 1,700 additional serious offenders and reflects the need to adjust the way that community corrections dollars are forecasted to more accurately reflect costs incurred by counties. This budget avoids shifting the responsibility of these critical public safety services to local government.
The Governor is committed to funding a new method of building the community corrections budget for the state’s partnership with Oregon counties. He believes the new community corrections model is more accurate, stable, and promotes cost effective practices at the local level, and he has put money into the recommended budget to support this change.
However, due to other reductions in overall funding for this area, he intends to sit down with county partners to talk about the best way to use the money available and options, including changing the scope of their work, to both maintain the integrity of the system and match expectations to resources.
Oregon’s National Guard also plays an important role in both state and national security. The budget allows the military to expand and maintain facilities critical for supporting their mission both here and abroad. The budget also contains funds to provide additional benefits to Oregon National Guard members who have been deployed.
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