Greener pastures?
County police salaries lag behind neighboring localities
By Richard Foster CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Some county police officers say they should be paid higher wages for the service they provide to the community.

Despite having a bigger geographic area and population to patrol, Chesterfield County police officers are paid smaller starting salaries and generally make significantly less by rank than neighboring jurisdictions.

A starting Chesterfield officer makes $36,000 per year, compared to $36,500 in Richmond and about $36,715 in Henrico County. The pay range for a sergeant in Chesterfield is $48,336 to $73,058; however, sergeants in Richmond make $57,500 to $94,000, and Henrico sergeants make around $50,980 to $89,485. Similar pay disparities can be found in other ranks too.

Consequently, "all compensation is under review in all salary ranges," says Kristin Brown, human resources manager for the Chesterfield Police Department.

Police Chief Col. Carl. Baker says salary adjustments will likely be sought from county administration before the coming fiscal year begins in July. "We want to stay competitive, and we do everything we can to stay competitive in the market, and we periodically take a look at other [jurisdictions'] starting salaries and if we need to make an adjustment, we do. We want to remain competitive in our salaries. We are looking at it again now, and we will probably be making adjustments," says Baker. 

In addition to the police department's own market studies of area salaries, the county government also conducts regular market salary studies. The county has adjusted officer salaries three times within the last four years, one of which corrected salaries because incoming officers would have been making more than some officers who had already been with the department a few years.

Starting salaries have been increased each year since 2004, raising pay from $31,052 to $36,000. In 2005, all officers also received an additional three percent pay increase in addition to the annual merit pay increases, which were four percent this year, Brown says.

Still, some officers say the pay increases aren't enough when they are putting their lives on the line each day. One officer, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution for complaining in the press, says that whenever he complains to his superiors in the department about the pay gap between Chesterfield and neighboring jurisdictions, the higher ups cite the county's Triple-A bond rating and reputation for fiscal responsibility.

"That bond rating doesn't pay my mortgage," the officer says. "It doesn't keep food on my table. I don't see how it benefits [county] employees in any way, shape or form."

Sgt. Kevin P. Carroll, president of the Chesterfield Fraternal Order of Police, says, "It's always a concern if there are other jurisdictions that are surrounding us that are making more money than our officers are for the same job, and we would always try to work with the county to improve the pay scales for our officers."

Carroll says he's waiting to take a position on the issue pending the results of a pay study that's currently underway by the police department, but he remains optimistic since "the Fraternal Order of Police has a very good open dialogue with the county to address concerns we have in relation to these matters, and they're always willing to listen."

He considers the pay disparity between Chesterfield and the surrounding localities to be "an important issue, but there are lots of important issues we're trying to address - health care, retirement benefits and retention of officers.. ... All of those issues affect morale and the ability to employ and retain personnel."

Despite the salary parity issue, Chesterfield does offer similar benefits to other counties, Baker and Brown say. For instance, Chesterfield and Henrico both offer take-home squad cars and laptops. (Richmond doesn't have take-home laptops, and it only has a limited number of take-home cars.) Chesterfield and Henrico also offer annual merit pay increases, and all three localities offer career development pay increases to regular police officers for having college credits and other criteria.

But despite offering higher pay, Henrico and Richmond have similar recruitment challenges to Chesterfield.

For one thing, all local departments are under authorized strength. Chesterfield is authorized to have 510 officers, but currently has only 452. (Baker is seeking 20 more new officers in the upcoming county budget.) Similarly, Henrico also is down about 60 officers from its authorized strength. Some of the vacancies are due to a slew of new positions being created every year because of overwhelming growth in Henrico and Chesterfield. There's also the problem of retiring baby boomer officers. Finding willing and able recruits in wartime is also pretty competitive. "We're all looking for similar people in the same pool," Baker says.

About 70 percent of Chesterfield's officers are recruited from metro Richmond, but the department is increasingly looking outside Virginia, particularly in northern states.

"We've had lots of luck in Pennsylvania and New York state up around Buffalo," Brown says. "In Pennsylvania, it's very difficult to get police jobs. Our economy is growing, and theirs is not. They have an industrial economy and the towns are shrinking rather than growing and they don't have as many openings. We're competitive [compared to the northern states] because of our cost of living and climate," as well as the top-rated Chesterfield schools for officers' children.

Henrico Police recruiter James Yeom says that the majority of Henrico's new hires also come from the metro area, and he doesn't think that most of the metro police agencies are really competing for the locals per se, because if "they're born and raised here, they already have a pretty good idea of which agency they want. If we do compete, it's for people out of town." Both Yeom and Brown tell stories of meeting recruiters from Richmond area agencies in far-off places like Buffalo, N.Y.

Another problem is that federal law enforcement agencies will often recruit from local police departments like Chesterfield, which invests $100,000 in training in each new recruit, Baker and Brown say. The department's turnover rate has remained at about six percent for the last several years, which they say isn't that high.

"I've been doing this for 38 years and there isn't a year that goes by that the officers haven't complained about their pay," Baker says. Police officers are "relatively lower paid" compared to other occupations, but "obviously we do the best we can for our officers, and I can tell you I'm committed to our officers. I do the best I can to see that they have the best salary and working conditions they can."