After more than three decades as a police officer in Cobb County, Ricci Mason believes the time for supporting public safety workers has been long overdue.
After retiring from the Cobb County Police Department last year, Mason has decided to push for that change as a first-time candidate for political office.
A former officer in Precinct 4 in East Cobb, Mason is one of two candidates challenging incumbent Mike Boyce (profile here) in the Republican primary June 9 for Cobb Commission Chairman, along with Larry Savage (profile here).
“There’s a lot of wasteful spending,” Mason said. “But my biggest reason [for running] is public safety. It’s just not been a priority.”
Mason lives in Acworth and is a member of Eastside Baptist Church in East Cobb.
(Here’s Mason’s campaign website.)
During his campaign, he has recited many of the arguments public safety advocates have been making in pushing for support for police officers, firefighters and emergency personnel.
“New officers are leaving in droves,” Masson said in impassioned tones. “Police hadn’t had raise in 10 years. We’ve been taken advantage of.”
The police department is around 100 officers short, “and we’ve failed to fill those positions.”
Salary and benefit packages as well as retention issues have been festering for years, he said, undermining the message on a patch officers wear that’s visible to the public: “We lead, others follow.”
“Right now, that’s being mocked,” said Mason, who also was an officer in the Marietta Police Department.
Cobb commissioners have taken initial steps to address some of those concerns with a one-time bonus and approval of a step-and-grade salary structure for public safety personnel, but Mason isn’t impressed.
He said a Cobb police sergeant he knows said his raise amount to eight cents an hour.
“That’s a slap in the face,” Mason said, adding that step-and-grade is “irrelevant. Until you can give younger officers some motivation to stay, it’s not going to matter.”
Among the public safety concerns is that Cobb, which has a highly-praised police training center, spends a lot of money training officers, then losing them to nearby cities and counties that offer better pay and benefits.
“It costs $80,000 to train an officer, and it ends up costing us more when we lose them,” Mason said.
He said Boyce has had three years to address the problem and thinks he’s coming along too late to do much good.
“You deserve to be protected,” Mason said. “But that promise has dissolved like a dirty rag in water.”
To address the issue, Mason said he would look across the county budget to find more financial resources, and thinks “there are a lot of things that are wants ahead of needs.”
He pointed to things like libraries, which got some expanded hours after the 2018 budget was approved with a millage rate increase.
Mason said he’s not against libraries, but wondered about recent decisions to being reopening libraries “when officers on the street, who are considered essential workers, aren’t getting anything.”
He was referencing a proposal before the commissioners to provide hazard pay for public safety and other county employees on frontline COVID-19 duty. That proposal has been put on hold while the number of workers and the amount of funding is determined.
The county will soon have to deal with the financial impact of much lower tax revenues, making public safety funding even more acute, as Mason sees it. Budgeting figures to become even more painful, but “you have to go across the board and sit down with all of the department heads.
“We are definitely in uncharted waters, but we’ve got to stabilize the cornerstone of the county [meaning public safety] before we can do anything else.”
Addressing county transportation issues is another priority for Mason, especially the condition of county roads.
As a former motorcycle officer, Mason said “I know where all the potholes are” and says “I can’t remember when the roads were really taken care of.”
A referendum on the November ballot to extend the Cobb SPLOST is devoted to road resurfacing projects, but Mason says other road maintenance and transportation issues also aren’t being properly addressed.
On zoning matters, Mason thinks that given current circumstances, “we need to slow down on building” at least for the time being.
“I want people to be safe and healthy and thrive for themselves,” he said. “We need to help people get back on their feet again and show them that they care.”
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