Columbia leaders say city’s spending reflects priority on safety
Mitchell Kaminski
COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Columbia residents had the chance to learn more about the city’s newly approved fiscal year 2026 budget during a “Let’s Talk Local” event on Wednesday night.
Mayor Barbara Buffaloe hosted the discussion at Missouri United Methodist Church, where city officials outlined spending priorities and answered questions from the community. Around 35 people — including city staff and media — attended.
During the presentation, the city’s Director of Finance Matthew Lue shared an anecdote that summed up the message behind the city’s budget priorities.
“Don’t tell me what your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are,” Lue said in reference to a quote from James W. Frick.
By that measure, public safety remains one of Columbia’s top priorities. The city will spend $35 million on police and $30 million on the fire department this fiscal year. The next highest line item is Public Works at $17 million.
“The majority of that is for people,” Buffaloe told ABC 17 News. “It’s for the people responding for when you call for service.”
The city is operating under a planned deficit for the second straight year. However, City Manager De’Carlon Seewood said that was partly by design. Last year’s shortfall helped purchase new police vehicles, while this year’s budget focuses on raising employee salaries.
“Last year, with capital purchases, we bought police vehicles. We bought vehicles for public works and so that was actually purposely done,” Seewood said during the meeting when talking about the deficit. “This year, it is about employees. Like the mayor said, we made a commitment to our employees. In the past, we hadn’t been rewarding our employees, and our salaries hadn’t adjusted and what we saw was we couldn’t hire anyone.”
Seewood told ABC 17 News the city is currently reviewing its revenue sources after being asked whether tax increases could help close the deficit and improve staffing. He said that while it’s an option, no decisions have been made.
Staffing remains a concern for the Columbia Police Department, though Chief Jill Schlude said the department is carefully evaluating its needs before making additional funding requests.
CPD plans to bring back the downtown unit in May, but that move will come at the expense of the traffic unit.
“A city this size should have traffic so we want to make sure we build out a real ask,” Schlude said during the meeting. “I told the mayor this the other day and I think she was surprised but at one point we only had one detective working all the property crimes in the city.”
Schlude was also asked about the homelessness downtown. She says the department has been tracking calls they get about the unhoused and roughly 86% of those are for trespassing.
“I think it’s important for people to understand that the police department. We’re not policing housing status, we’re policing behavior,” Schlude said. “So we’re responding to what people are doing that is not within the law, and just the way the world is right now, we get called to handle a lot of things that really aren’t things that we handle.”
Schlude said most of the city’s officers have received crisis intervention training, but the police training program the city previously used did not offer it, leaving a gap in the department. She said the goal is to reach 100% certification, though the training takes a full week to complete.
The city has recently ramped up enforcement efforts downtown, but questions remain about how long that can last.
“Obviously, we have outside forces that are helping out right now, especially on weekends and gamedays. But we don’t expect it to happen much after the season,” Buffaloe told ABC 17 News. “When it gets colder, we don’t have as many hotspots in the downtown area. But, if you look forward to our fiscal year ’26 budget, we actually will, because of people we have graduating from the academy, we will have our summer unit starting before the summer of next year.”
The next Let’s Talk Local discussion is scheduled in two weeks and will feature D’Markus Thomas-Brown from the Office of Violence Prevention.