Omaha City Council President Chris Jerram has drafted an amendment to the proposed 2021 budget to take funds from the Police Department and allocate them to employment and health services.

Jerram is suggesting that $2 million, or 1.2%, be taken from the Omaha Police Department’s proposed $161.3 million budget and given to other programming.

Under Jerram’s amendment, $500,000 would be given to Heartland Workforce Solutions and $1.5 million to community health and human services for “behavioral health counseling, mental health crisis diagnosis, treatment and response, mental/behavioral health rehabilitation services and other related treatment, housing, safety and support services.”

Jerram declined to comment on his budget resolution until it is on the council agenda.

On Tuesday, the council heard from the public about Mayor Jean Stothert’s proposed 2021 budget. Many called to “defund the police” — taking money from the department and reinvesting the money in the community in other ways. Others supported the police and called for the entire budget to be approved.

The 2021 budget proposal would increase police spending by $1.96 million — or 1.2% — over this year’s allocated budget. Jerram’s amendment, if ratified, would mean that the Police Department would get almost the same amount of money next year as it’s getting this year.

As proposed, the police budget would account for 36.7% of all day-to-day city spending in 2021. This year, the police budget was 37.9% of the entire city budget, Stothert said.

Stothert and Police Chief Todd Schmaderer swiftly opposed Jerram’s proposal.

In a statement, Stothert said she encourages other council members to reject the amendment, which she said “requires us to reduce the number of officers.”

“President Jerram’s amendment compromises public safety and contradicts his longtime support for the Omaha Police Department and his belief that we need more police officers, not fewer,” she said. “We have a responsibility to taxpayers to show them exactly where and how we spend their money. This amendment appropriates $1.5 million to unidentified agencies.”

At a meeting last week, Schmaderer told the City Council that cuts to the police budget could reduce crime intervention and prevention efforts.

In a statement Thursday, Schmaderer said he is getting “mixed signals” from Jerram.

“Two million dollars equates to about 20 officers lost, or a combination of attrition and/or reduced services,” he said. “The amendment is not methodical and will undoubtedly have unintended consequences.”

Schmaderer said that he wouldn’t necessarily cut 20 officers but that he would “have that on the table because most of it is personnel cost, so there’s going to be some services cut, maybe a combination of services and personnel.”

Stothert said Thursday that there was no indication during discussions of the budget that Jerram would submit the proposal.

The council usually gives Stothert five or six small things they want to add to the budget, “and that’s fine,” she said. “When this one came in, that was obviously a different story.”

“If by any chance this gets through with four votes of the City Council, then I have one more chance, and that’s to veto these budget resolutions,” Stothert said. “Then they would have to have five votes from the City Council to override the veto.”

Schmaderer has been police chief since 2012. He said he and Stothert formulated a “data driven, empirical” policing plan to account for growth in the city.

“We reached those numbers with the approval of the council all the way up to this point, and now all of a sudden there’s a $2 million swipe to the Omaha police budget that is not methodical, that is not empirically driven and seems to go against all the data that we used to get up to this particular point,” he said.

There are currently 876 police officers working, and four officers are set to leave in coming months, he said.