Sacramento has a public safety problem.

On that Mayor Heather Fargo and challenger Kevin Johnson agree. It's also where the agreement ends.

As the city faces historic budget shortfalls, the debate over how much money should be spent on cops and firefighters has become a divisive issue in the campaign for City Hall.

Fargo, the two-term incumbent, argues that public safety shouldn't be beefed up at the expense of other services like parks and after-school programs. During the primary election, critics charged she didn't take crime seriously enough. But in recent weeks, Fargo has spoken out more forcefully on public safety.

"In the long run, we need to figure out a way to have more officers," she told The Bee. "When the economy improves and we have more money in the budget, it's going to be a priority, but it's going to be very hard to take money out of other departments."

Johnson, the NBA star turned Oak Park educator and developer, hit the public safety issue hard from the day he entered the race and landed endorsements from city police and fire unions.

After hearing from voters that their overwhelming concern was the safety of Sacramento's streets, he suggested increasing public safety's share of the city budget – perhaps by as much as $38 million.

The problem, according to his critics: He hasn't provided a list of which programs he'd cut to meet his public safety pledge.

"We as a city need to look at the resources that we have and realign them with the priorities that fit the city's needs and what the public wants," Johnson said in an interview. "If Sacramento did not have a crime problem, I might be talking about all of this differently. But we do."

To fill a $58 million budget gap for the current fiscal year, the City Council recently approved slashing city department budgets 20 percent. But the two largest departments were mostly spared – the police budget was cut by 8 percent and the Fire Department by 4 percent.

That has left 54 percent of the general fund budget earmarked for public safety. Johnson said the number should be over 60 percent but indicated he favors getting to that number gradually – not in a single budget.

No matter how long it takes, the changes would require harsh cuts in other departments, Fargo and other city officials said.

Johnson said he would wait to "bring forth very clear ideas of what we should cut" until the next budget cycle begins. He said he'll hire a third-party auditor to identify waste in the budget and use his business contacts to help the city generate more revenue.

"Are there projects we can postpone, are there things we are spending our dollars on that if the economy was good would be fine?" he asked.

Fargo charges that Johnson is "making promises he can't keep" and that his plan to add to public safety could decimate other city services.

"It could also drive up the cost of police and drive up the crime rate if we stop after-school programs or don't keep our community centers open," Fargo said.

The mayor and other city officials questioned Johnson's assessment of the public safety share of the budget. They said that when non-discretionary spending was taken out of the equation – costs like insurance, retirement benefits and the mortgage on City Hall – police and fire got 72 percent of what was left in the current budget.

If Johnson's proposal to raise the public safety budget is combined with what many expect to be at least a $40 million budget gap for the next fiscal year, very little would be left over, critics charge.

"We value public safety, but do we value it so much that we want to place a death penalty on other services?" asked Councilman Kevin McCarty, who endorsed Fargo. "It's unrealistic and I would say an absolute sham to say these things without laying out specific cuts or having a revenue augmentation program."

McCarty said Johnson's plan could mean the city would have to drastically cut the budget for the city's park system, abandon programs for 9,000 students at city schools and scale back library hours. Johnson recently advocated eliminating raises for council members, a plan McCarty said he supports but would save just $30,000.

Call The Bee's Ryan Lillis, (916) 321-1085.