— Reported by Alex Pickett and Wayne Garcia

It seemed simple enough. Neighborhood activists in St. Pete are faced with reductions in programs aimed at fighting crime and improving the city, due to the potential $22.6 million in budget cuts that may follow property tax reform.

What if, they asked, the city contracted out its police work to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office?

For the past few weeks, they had secretly talked with City Council members about the idea as they gathered financial data to see how much money could be saved.

But asking Sheriff Jim Coats to step in? That part was apparently too hot to handle. When asked about the plan by CL reporters, community leaders who had been briefed about it denied knowing of it or backed away from it quickly — likely because policing in St. Petersburg is a political and racial hot potato.

On Wednesday night, however, the Council Of Neighborhood Associations took the plunge anyway. Its members voted 13-3 to urge the St. Petersburg City Council to send a Request for Proposed Services letter to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office for a cost estimate on outsourcing police duties for the city. CONA’s police review committee will also start researching the matter.

“The rumblings have always been that the Sheriff’s Office could do the policing job for much less than the police department can do it,” says former CONA president Karl Nurse, who presented the issue to the membership. “It looks like the alternative [budget cuts due to property tax reform] could be as much as wipe out everything but police, fire, sewer and garbage services. In that kind of environment, I don’t know how you could not at least ask the question.”

City officials have previously said they are looking at deep cuts, including nearly $2 million in arts and cultural funding for private groups in St. Pete. That idea brought out a flurry of letters to the editor in the St. Petersburg Times begging for those funds to remain.

But getting rid of the police department — as troubled as it is with staffing levels and neighborhood complaints about the elimination of Community Police Officers — is the third rail of St. Pete politics. The Sheriff’s Office has been viewed with great suspicion by many in the black community, to whom Mayor Rick Baker owes no small part of his two election victories. Sheriff’s deputies have shot and killed two black St. Pete men in the past few years in incidents that raised great ire in the community.

Councilman James Bennett expresses the view of those who, even if they have problems with SPPD, wouldn’t want to switch.

"Every police department has their pros and cons, but it's ours," he said. Consolidating the police department with the Sheriff's Office “is even a step further from somebody who knows your community."

Bennett continued, “This issue hasn't gone away. People have talked about consolidating with the sheriff's office for years. I don't see much support in doing away with our police department. I don't see it as a likely reality.”

Mayor Baker could not immediately be reached for comment. But SPPD spokesman Bill Proffitt weighed in with the view that "everybody in St. Pete likes having their own police department.” Proffitt learned of the CONA vote late in the afternoon today, and “when I heard it, I was shocked anybody would seriously consider that."

All this agita for the suggestion that the city simply find out how much it might cost for the sheriff to take over law enforcement inside the city limits. CONA’s resolution didn’t say it favored such a change, just that city budgeters owe it to the taxpaying residents to find out all the facts.

Most interesting to watch in all this will be the Times, which has been a staunch editorial supporter of Baker’s and always urges great caution when it comes to something that could upset the city’s often-delicate race relations.