The Haines Borough Assembly took no action on several police budget-related amendments at a meeting Tuesday, despite discussion at a budget Committee of the Whole meeting the week prior.
Amendments discussed at last week’s budget meeting included increasing police overtime and standby hours, and transferring money from the areawide general fund to the townsite fund to reimburse for police emergency response outside the townsite.
At the meeting, borough officials discussed additional funding for police to either hire a sixth officer or bulk up standby and overtime hours to compensate.
“Historically we have under-budgeted for overtime, standby, training, vacation and for hire of new officers,” Mayor Douglas Olerud said, citing the current fiscal year where increased bear activity and the December natural disaster have caused increased police hours.
On Tuesday, the assembly approved a $30,000 budget amendment for the department for the current fiscal year. The budget amendment offsets a last-minute budget cut introduced by then-assembly member Brenda Josephson. At the final budget meeting in 2020, Josephson proposed cutting the police budget by $35,000 as a cost saving measure.
Police chief Heath Scott said increasing officer hours, or hiring another officer, can prevent burnout and save the borough money long-term.
“When I inherited the agency, as it was, you had very high attrition rates, very high officer complaint rates. We have reduced officer complaint rates almost to zero, and we aren’t burning officers out nearly as much,” Scott said at the budget meeting.
If the assembly doesn’t want to hire a sixth officer, Scott proposed increasing overtime hours from 600, the funding level in the current budget, budget to 2,600, and standby from 4,400 to 8,000.
Four years ago, when Scott first began serving as chief, the Haines Borough Police Department received less funding, in terms of gross wages, than departments in similarly-sized communities in Southeast. Since then, the department’s budget has grown almost every year. Overtime hours have doubled and standby hours have increased by a multiple of five. In 2019, standby hours more than doubled in an effort to compensate for the assembly’s directive that officers respond to urgent calls outside the townsite.
Last year, Scott’s proposal for increasing police funding through the hiring of an additional officer or an increase in hours received community pushback. He backed off the proposal in favor of a flat-funded, five-officer force.
Assembly members at last week’s meeting expressed interest in increasing overtime and standby hours for police in the coming fiscal year by a factor of 20%-30%. The cost would be somewhere between $16,000 and $24,000, according to an estimate chief fiscal officer Jila Stuart provided for the Tuesday assembly meeting.
“I’d like to see us increase the overtime and standby by some percentage point,” assembly member Paul Rogers said at the budget meeting. He said he recognizes that last year was atypical in terms of police response, but he feels the department lacks funding necessary to do its job.
Stuart pointed out that the current budget provides funding for nearly two officers available for response per hour, discounting training and vacation time.
“I feel like our standard has changed over time. Years ago, we used to just try to have one officer on at a time,” Stuart said. “We’ve had a paradigm shift where we feel like there should be two people available at all times.”
Scott said some of the increases have to do with officer response requirements for specific types of calls like domestic violence, which requires two officers.
Some assembly members said it made sense to wait and see how the department does this year with five fully trained officers before making drastic changes to the budget. For most of last year, the department was either down an officer or had an officer in training.
“This is our first year with five officers that are fully trained. Before jumping into six, let’s see how we do with five,” assembly member Gabe Thomas said.
Scott said a wait-and-see approach is fine as long as his department isn’t punished for exceeding allotted hours.
“I don’t want to drag our officers or the department or the borough through the mud if we do need to do a budget amendment,” Scott said.
At the budget meeting, assembly members also discussed potential formulas for reimbursing the townsite service fund for police response outside the townsite. Last year, the assembly formalized the practice of emergency police response outside the townsite by amending a 2019 resolution.
A proposal put forward by Scott and Stuart would require reimbursement based on the population percentage that lives outside the borough townsite, divided by two to account for the reduced level of service provided.
Several assembly members said the formula seemed arbitrary. Stuart and Scott admitted that it is to a certain extent, but said the borough lacks data to base funding on hours involved in response time.
“We can fine-tune it, and we can use data, but at some point, it’s going to have to be a bit of a spit ball,” Stuart said.
Assembly members also expressed interest at the budget meeting in pursuing a grant to subsidize the hiring of a sixth officer.
None of these proposals were discussed at Tuesday’s regular assembly meeting. The assembly has until June 15 to finalize a budget.