By Cherrie Anne E. Villahermosa
Variety News Staff

THE Department of Public Safety is “feeling the pain” of budget cuts and may have to close a fire station, according to DPS Commissioner Rebecca Warfield.
“If our budget is cut further, our service to the community will deteriorate,” she said in an interview on Friday.
She said DPS has cut overtime, controlled its fuel expenses and is “doing the best we can with what resources we have.”
Warfield said police officers need the Legislature’s support.
“They need other human beings to help them. We need an academy — we’re in a situation right now where we’re walking on a tight wire. We need the help of the Legislature and the other government bodies to lend a hand. We’re not asking for enough opportunities to abuse, we’re just asking them to help the department protect the people in the community,” Warfield said.
With the department’s current level of funding, they might have to close a fire station, she added.
“We are looking at that possibility — we might close a fire station and if we close a fire station, that’s a very dangerous thing because response time now is a maximum of 15 minutes but, if we close a fire station, that would put the response time at 30 minutes and a person can suffer brain damage in just five minutes, so even though we’re only talking of minutes here...if we don’t respond properly the community will suffer, so we need support,” Warfield said.
She added that the governor is “100 percent” behind the department but “he can only do so much when it comes to funding.”
“It’s the Legislature that can allocate funds for the department, so on behalf of the men and women of the department, I ask for the support of the Legislature — we depend on them,” Warfield said.
She said DPS is currently running four shifts but doesn’t have enough people to staff these shifts.
Each month, she said, they rotate people from the Criminal Investigation Bureau to the patrol division “and then assign them back again to continue to provide service to the community and have other sectors of the island covered.”
Warfield added, “Our goal when I came on board was to have all of these sectors covered — a large sector in Kagman was to have at least two officers but we’re unable to do that simply because we don’t have enough human beings.”