Council’s Budget Hearing On Dare Emotion-Charged

Twelve-year-old Mike Bush couldn’t finish his sentence.

He’d already told Spokane City Council members Monday they shouldn’t dump DARE to balance the city’s budget.

He told them it was silly to spend $97,000 for a spay-and-neuter program when his peers are at risk to abuse drugs and alcohol.

But when he tried to tell them about his older brother, he broke down in tears, the words tangling in his mouth.

His mother came to his rescue.

“You have no idea how hard it is for him to be here tonight,” said M’Liss Bush, who rushed to the podium to comfort her son. “His 16-year-old brother was just put into (drug) rehab yesterday.”

Then, she turned angrily from the council to Police Chief Terry Mangan, who was seated in the audience.

“You can budget better. You can manage better. You can do better. There’s no excuse” for cutting the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program from next year’s budget, she said.

A hearing on the city’s proposed 1996 spending plan drew passionate appeals from children, parents and teachers outraged by the Police Department’s plan to cut the $550,000-a-year program after June 30.

Children dressed in their red-black-and-white DARE shirts delivered to the council a banner, hundreds of letters and an 8-foot-long petition that argued against the proposed cut.

Mangan told the council his department was working with the Spokane School District and private schools to come up with a replacement program that would free the seven DARE officers at least part-time - for routine calls.

The new program couldn’t be called DARE, but police officers still would be involved in teaching the course on a less frequent basis, Mangan said. Like DARE, it would teach students about peer pressure, drug and alcohol abuse, and self-esteem.

“What it comes down to is a choice between dropping DARE and having enough police officers” to keep the community safe, Mangan said.

Spokane resident Garth Benham, a former Los Gatos, Calif., police officer, applauded the chief’s budget-balancing efforts.

“This is an emotional issue. It makes us feel good to think we are conquering the drug problem,” he said. “It would make us feel better if we were actually doing it.”

Benham listed three studies, both state and federal, that say DARE doesn’t effectively discourage drug use.

“We owe it to our community. We owe it to our kids to try a program that will work better and might be more cost effective,” he said.

DARE supporters counter the program started in Los Angeles in 1983 hasn’t been around long enough for a true test of its long-term effectiveness. Also, they say, the program never promised to eliminate drug use but to lessen it.

“We can’t save every child, but we can save the majority,” said resident Al Paine, who also paused for tears while urging the council not to cut DARE.

DARE isn’t the only program proposed for cuts in next year’s police budget.

The city’s money woes have forced the police department to cut nearly $1 million from the 1996 spending plan. Spokane’s largest department spends nearly $28.3 million a year.

The department plans to cut its overtime budget by $500,000 next year, as well as reduce spending for grant-writing efforts and community-oriented policing.

, DataTimes