A sidenote on public safety salaries during the presentation of Burlington’s proposed budget became the centerpiece a day later thanks to the intercession of one council member with some experience in this arena of government.
Councilman Jeff Smythe, who formerly served as the city’s chief of police, had originally shared some concerns about the competitiveness of police and firefighter pay when the city manager unveiled his spending plan for the city on Monday.
Smythe resurrected this issue when the council reassembled on Tuesday – although in this case, he came armed with a specific request that the rest of the council readily endorsed to the city’s administrators.
Under the proposed budget that city manager Bob Patterson had pitched to the council, both police officers and firefighters make out a bit better than other members of Burlington’s staff. In the case of police, this advantage consists of a 2.3 percent “developmental increase” in addition to the 3-percent “cost-of-living adjustment” that the city manager has proposed for the rest of the city’s full-time employees.
In spite of this relatively liberal treatment, Smythe observed that the police department’s salaries have steadily lost ground to other jurisdictions over the past several years. In order to reverse this trend, he called on his colleagues to establish a systematic process for raising police and firefighter pay that actually takes account of the salaries at competing agencies.
“It costs us between $50,000 and $100,000 to grow a brand, new police officer or a brand, new firefighter, and when we lose those folks in the first two years, that sunk cost is gone.”
City councilman Jeff Smythe
In laying out his proposal to the rest of the council, Smythe was careful to note the specific reasons why he thinks these public safety positions warrant greater consideration from the council than other staff-level posts. Among other things, the former police chief argued that the city makes a greater investment in training and equipping its police officers and firefighters than it does for the rest of its staff.
“It costs us between $50,000 and $100,000 to grow a brand, new police officer or a brand, new firefighter,” Smythe explained at the tail end of a city council meeting on Tuesday, “and when we lose those folks in the first two years, that sunk cost is gone.”
These sorts of wage-inspired defections were also weighing on Smythe’s mind when he ended his tenure as the city’s police chief in 2021. It ultimately fell to his immediate successor Brian Long to stop this hemorrhaging of personnel by convincing Burlington’s city council to add $7,271 a year to the salary of every police officer in the city’s employ.
This seemingly astronomical increase, which the council adopted in the opening week of 2022, was followed a year later by a pay bump for the city’s firefighters of $6,500 per annum. By that point, the council’s largesse to the police force was already beginning to bear fruit as other local law enforcement agencies found themselves hard pressed to match Burlington’s generosity.
The city’s police department remained the envy of other agencies when Long passed the proverbial torch to Burlington’s current police chief Alan Balog. Since then, however, Balog has become increasingly concerned that his department has begun to yield its preeminent status to other law enforcement concerns.
Last month, Balog warned the city council that the latest comparative figures have placed police compensation in Burlington at the bottom 40th percentile among agencies within a radius of 50 miles. This revelation was later recounted by councilmember Dejuana Bigelow during the city manager’s budget presentation on Monday. It also formed the subtext of Smythe’s own harangue to the council on the following evening.
“Historically, we have allowed police and fire pay to languish to the point where it becomes critical. Then, we respond with very expensive corrective action programs that right the ship for a short period of time.”
– Burlington city councilman Jeff smythe
“Historically,” he said, “we have allowed police and fire pay to languish to the point where it becomes critical. Then, we respond with very expensive corrective action programs that right the ship for a short period of time.”
In order to short circuit this cycle, Smythe urged his colleagues to have the city’s administrators use police pay within a 50-mile radius to set “scientifically-applied benchmarks” that would guide the city’s efforts to recruit and retain high-quality police officers and firefighters.
“If we make these minor course corrections at a reasonable cost every single year,” he summed up, “we won’t have these major recorrect kinds of issues.”
Smythe’s recommendation was immediately echoed by Bigelow before receiving the endorsements of councilman Ian Baltutis and mayor Beth Kennett. In the meantime, the city’s mayor pro tem Bob Ward encouraged the city’s administrators to give some thought to a staff-wide pay study, although he too gave his blessing to Smythe’s proposed benchmarks.
In the end, Smythe assured his colleagues that the city’s residents will rest easy thanks to their support for this systematic approach to police and firefighter compensation.
“The citizens want to go to sleep at night and not worry about public safety,” he added. “But if we compromise, in some small way, police staffing and fire staff, folks might lose sleep, and I don’t think that’s the place we want to be in.”
