As crime-busy summer months approach, a temporary backup California Highway Patrol deployment for Vallejo will be tied to the state's next budget, city police officials said.

A gang-oriented CHP task force will be unavailable to come to Vallejo before July 1 -- at the earliest -- based on the CHP commissioner's decision to await until the next fiscal year, Vallejo police Capt. Dave Jackson said.

"We have conducted some operational planning meetings with the Highway Patrol," Jackson said. "We're just talking about how we're going to do it. That's part of the CalGRIP (California Gang Reduction, and Intervention and Prevention Program)."

CHP public information officer Jaime Coffee said Wednesday that all CalGRIP funding has been assigned for this fiscal year, which ends June 30. She said it remains unclear how much, if any, funding the program will receive next year.

Jackson said that awaiting the new fiscal year, though, may align with Vallejo's traditional summer increase in calls for police assistance. The number has typically peaked for the year in July and August in the last four years, according to department statistics.

"These programs are for 90-day periods, we want to make sure that we get the most use out of them," Jackson said. "It will mean added officers on the street level for a finite length of time, which will be positive -- we'll take what we can get."

That is, if the state budget is completed in time.

Jackson called expectations of a July 1 state budget, at the traditional start of the new fiscal year, "a little optimistic." He added that with the new budget comes the possibility of the elimination of the special task force's funding all together.

Work was begun in February to draft extra CHP bodies into Vallejo's service, likely for a three-month period. That effort began in the wake of the department's shrinking budget and personnel numbers, and coincided with several high-profile violent crimes.

While Vallejo's crime issues expand beyond gang-related activities, Jackson said, the CHP program is specific to that issue. Conveniently for the city's needs, areas of high gang activity often correlate with areas of high general crime as well, he said.

The last time a CHP task force helped Vallejo was in the mid-1990s, shortly after 31 homicides were investigated in 1994.

In addition, the Solano Sheriff's Department provided supplemental patrols to Vallejo for two weeks beginning in mid-February.

Jackson said such supplemental forces are most effective when they are combined with a "comprehensive long-term strategy." He conceded that such strategizing is difficult without city financial resources.

The department is already leaning heavily on so-called mutual aid services, which are informal agreements between local law enforcement agencies to briefly intervene in others' jurisdictions when asked to, department Public Information Officer Lt. Abel Tenorio said.

"We're worried that we're abusing (the mutual aid)," Tenorio said. "There's a possibility that it could become a hardship (to other agencies)."