The police chief gutted the gang task force because of tight finances. We are down more than 100 officers needed to properly protect a city this size.

Meanwhile, gang members are charged with viciously murdering two local teenagers. Two young children were stabbed to death Tuesday. A teen fought for his life Wednesday after getting shot near downtown.

The public is numbing to volent crimes as the murder rate ticks up.

We wonder why city officials, given our law enforcement dilemma, would not urgently maximize collection of revenues rightly owed to city government.

Mayor John Suthers has complained since June about $17 million the city should have received over the past six years as payments in lieu of taxes from Colorado Springs Utilities. That is a lot of money and could pay for most of the cops we need.

The utility, a quasi-governmental enterprise, makes payments in lieu of taxes (known as a PILT), to cover what a private utility would pay in property, sales and use taxes. The formula that determines the payment hasn’t been adjusted since 2010. If it had been adjusted to reflect the utility’s increasing revenues, annual payments of $31 million would have increased to produce the estimated $17 million Suthers believes the city forfeited.

Readjusting the PILT calculation could quickly fund the hiring of cops and upgrade police and other outdated city fleet vehicles without raising taxes.

For rationale no one will explain, the Colorado Springs Utilities finance committee recommended recently to indefinitely postpone further talks about updating the PILT calculation.

Colorado Springs Utilities Board Vice Chairman Andres Pico said “he was unsure who requested discussions about the payments be put on hold or why. City spokeswoman Jamie Fabos said Suthers did not request the postponement and that the city will continue to ‘deal with it’ if the formula remains unchanged,” explained an Oct. 13 article by Gazette reporter Conrad Swanson.

The finance committee’s decision to ignore the issue will go to the utility’s board of directors in November for approval or rejection.

The board should reject the recommendation and move immediately to adjust the PILT formula.

The utility’s board of directors is the City Council. The council convenes as the board, and pretends it is an entirely separate entity with concerns and responsibilities unique to the utility and unrelated to City Hall. The makeshift system represents one of the more colossal examples of institutionalized conflict of interest anyone can find.

Despite the pretense of convening as something other than City Council, the utilities board members are nine people elected to legislate in the best interest of the public. Few would argue against treating public safety as the highest priority for city government. The utility’s board (aka City Council) cannot give Colorado Springs Utilities a friendly deal on the PILT without neglecting its responsibility to provide an adequate number of cops.

We can only imagine how quickly City Council would demand the community’s fair share of taxes from a private, for-profit utility like Xcel or Black Hills, which serve our neighbors to the north and south.

Colorado Springs benefits by owning a utility enterprise regulated by local officials. Those benefits are partly negated if other city services suffer as a result of special deals on PILT collections.

The City Council should immediately adjust the utility’s payments to address a cop shortage that fosters a looming public safety crisis.