City councilors were receptive Monday to a multimillion-dollar plan that would put 45 more police officers on the street in the next three years.

However, most of the councilors who attended a meeting of the Finance Committee asked Police Chief Eric Johnson for more information before a public hearing on the plan scheduled for next week.

"The plan is short on details," Councilor Patti Bushee said. "Just throwing wads of money at the problem may not give the desired effect."

Johnson and Mayor David Coss want to add 15 officers and three support positions per year for the next three years to the Police Department ranks. They say that increase will be adequate to police the current city boundaries, though more will be needed if annexation plans go through.

Coss and Johnson want to pay for the new cops with a property tax increase that would add $29 a year for the next three years to a home valued at $300,000, Coss said. That increase — a .294 percent jump — would only raise half of the projected $5.4 million cost, however.

The funds for the other half come from less certain sources, according to a memo from Johnson and Coss. For the 2007-08 fiscal year — when the cost of the new personnel will cost $1.8 million — the mayor and chief propose using $250,000 in "carryover funds" from the current fiscal year, $450,000 from a property tax that was formerly spent on the Regional Emergency Communications Center, $150,000 from re-allocated general fund money and $50,000 in projected revenue from a red-light camera program that does not yet exist, according to the memo.

If approved, the proposed property tax increase would be the second such measure to benefit city police since 2006. The previous increase — which upped the property tax $59 a year on a $300,000 property — averted a staffing crisis during which more than 25 of the 155 patrol spots were vacant, Johnson said. Since January 2007, the department has hired 33 officers and lowered the vacancy rate to 10, he said.

Still, even with the new officers on board, the department has trouble maintaining the minimum staffing level of nine officers per shift, and often must call officers in to work overtime to meet the minimum, Johnson said. That means officers are usually running from call to call with no time for proactive policing, Johnson and Coss said. The department's response time for priority one calls has gone from 9 minutes, 53 seconds in 2000 to 22:22 in 2007, according to police statistics.

"The basic objective is to move from reaction management to a department that can conduct proactive policing of the city," Coss told councilors. "We're just holding our own (now)."

The city has also struggled for the last year and a half with a skyrocketing residential burglary rate, an increase in youth crime and drugs, and a rash of attacks on women that ended when the alleged perpetrator killed himself in jail. Johnson said the residential burglary rate in the first quarter of 2008 is down 32 percent over the first quarter of 2007, when it was up 94 percent over the first quarter of 2006.

If implemented, the new plan would increase the number of officers per shift from nine to 15 in three years and hopefully decrease the response time for priority calls to 18 minutes by June 2011, according to the plan.

Some councilors on Monday criticized the response time projection as an underwhelming goal.

"I gotta think maybe these goals are not what we should be shooting for," Councilor Chris Calvert said.

Bushee called the projection "pretty scant."

Johnson said he and his staff chose the 18-minute number because it was "realistic."

Other councilors seized on the proposed red-light camera program.

Councilor Carmichael Dominguez asked whether the program's main aim would be to increase safe driving or increase city revenues. "It seems like we'd want this (red-light problem) to continue to be bad to continue these revenues," he said.

Councilor Miguel Chavez echoed those concerns and asked for cost-to-benefit analysis of the proposed red-light program.

Johnson said from the driving habits he's observed in the city, the revenue projections may be "conservative."

Coss said he expects Councilor Ron Trujillo, who didn't attend Monday's meeting, to introduce a draft of the red-light camera ordinance within the next two weeks.

Councilors Matthew Ortiz and Rebecca Wurtzburger wondered about the big picture, with Ortiz saying he thinks a "reprioritization" of general funds may be in order. "If public safety is our priority — and I think it is — we need to look at places in City Hall that might be inefficient" to pay for it, he said.

Bushee also said she wanted to look at alternatives to property taxes to fund the plan.

Wurtzburger asked for more specifics on exactly what benefits the public stands to reap from the plan in terms of lower crime. She also asked how crime has changed in Santa Fe and what the "nature of crime" is now.

A public hearing on the police plan is scheduled for April 22 at the regular meeting of the Public Safety Committee.

Contact Jason Auslander at 986-3076 or :jauslander@sfnewmexican.com.