The Byrnes Mill Police Department has been losing a lot of officers due to a lack of adequate pay and benefits, Police Chief Frank T. Selvaggio said at a recent Board of Alderpersons meeting.
In June, the Police Department had 15 officers and now has 12, he said.
According to the chief, the most recent loss was on July 31 when an officer left for a higher-paying position. Three other officers have applied for jobs at other police departments and are waiting to hear back from them, he said.
“I have another officer leaving in two to three weeks, and four more probably after that,” Selvaggio said at the meeting. “If we don’t start paying these police officers more, we are not going to have a police department. It’s coming to fruition very quickly. I think these citizens expect a decent police department.
“Right now, (citizens) have a good police department, but they’re losing it.”
Low pay and the lack of a retirement system are the main reasons officers are leaving the Police Department, according to Selvaggio, as well as the city’s mayor and administrator.
“The main cause of friction here is the fact of our limited budget,” Mayor Rob Kiczenski said. “We got awarded ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds the last two years that we were able to utilize to help augment our budget.”
During the 2022-2023 fiscal year, two police officers were hired using federal ARPA federal funds distributed to local governments to mitigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, City Administrator Adam Thompson said.
The city no longer has ARPA funds to cover the new police officers’ salaries but doesn’t want to let go of the two officers hired last fiscal year, so their salaries, totaling $98,978, will come out of the city’s reserves, Thompson said.
“We’re in a situation where we have a small amount of money to spread across all departments – to fund the police, the streets, the administration and code enforcement,” Kiczenski said. “It’s difficult to do that.”
The city received a total of $623,120.14 in ARPA funds and spent about $320,240 of those funds during the 2022-2023 fiscal year and $302,880 during the 2021-2022 fiscal year to pay for a new HVAC system in the city hall, IT upgrades and new computers.
The city shrank its overall budget by 13 percent, or $290,000, this year, according to budget documents.
“Unfortunately, one of us is going to be the bad guy – either it’s me or somebody else on the board,” Thompson said. “It’s always going to be me because I made these (budget) suggestions, and I made the budget.
“Numbers don’t lie. You can’t add two numbers and get something that you want. I’m not a magician.”
The Police Department, which represents more than half the expenditures in the city’s 2023-2024 budget, received a 16.6 percent cut – with the city projected to spend $188,778 less to run the department in 2023-2024 than the previous fiscal year.
The budget, which began July 1 and runs through June 30, 2024, calls for the Police Department to spend $951,547.09.
Selvaggio said he rebuilt the department from the ground up when he was hired nearly five years ago.
“When I was hired here, I came into a department that was having a lot of internal difficulties,” he said. “There are no officers working here now who were here when I started. In rebuilding a department, you need to have good benefits to attract good officers. A lot of departments have benefits right now that have advantages over ours.”
Kiczenski said the city is looking for ways to bring in more officers, including possibly establishing a retirement system in the next budget cycle.
He said the first priority is to bring in more revenue so the city can afford to offer more job benefits.
“There’s quite a bit of turnover happening,” Kiczenski said. I think (a lack of benefits) is driving a lot of officers away because they seem to enjoy working in Byrnes Mill.
“At the end of the day, we all need to be able to eventually retire comfortably and make sure our families are taken care of.”
Thompson offered up an additional explanation for the officer turnover rate.
He said officers often use a small town like Byrnes Mill as a “stepping stone” before heading off to bigger and better-paying departments.
“No one comes to a small town to do their whole career here,” he said. “I think sometimes we take that a little personally, especially because we invest a lot of time and effort in training and equipment and stuff like that for these officers.”
“Working for the Sheriff’s Office is always going to be better than working for Byrnes Mill. It stinks, but that’s kind of just the way this goes.”
Selvaggio said the whole law enforcement industry, not just Byrnes Mill, is having trouble hiring people.
But, Selvaggio said he has an especially hard time recruiting officers because of the department’s lack of benefits and the city’s cinched budget.
“My job is 100 percent to tell the board the financial health of the city, whether it be good or bad,” Thompson said. “I’d rather it be good, but most of the time here, it’s bad. I’ve got to be truthful about that.
“(The need for more officers or other resources) is not going to sway me at all on the fact if (the board) doesn’t like it, or the chief doesn’t like it or anybody else in the city doesn’t like it.”