PINE BLUFF -- Pine Bluff police will see a pay increase of 5% of base pay plus an across-the-board bump of $2,776 for each uniformed officer added to their annual salary, according to a proposed 2020 budget.
The additional pay increase would come about by cutting 10 positions in the department, reducing the number of funded slots from 141 to 131. The total savings from cutting the positions come to more than $300,000.
The department, which has 118 uniformed officers, has struggled for years to maintain an adequate force to oversee the city.
When creating the municipal budget, all positions must be funded whether they are filled or not, and eliminating those positions would free funding to enable the raises, which range from a total, when factoring in the 5% raise, of 14.5% for entry-level patrol officers to 9% for the police chief.
Those raises, Assistant Police Chief Ricky Whitmore said, should help with retention and recruitment efforts, but he said it will likely take more time and more money to stabilize the department. He said that once a new officer is hired, he must go through 37 weeks of training, both at the department and at the police academy, before he is ready to hit the streets as a patrol officer.
"It's hard to recruit somebody to do this job," Whitmore said. "We're all fighting for the same people. A lot of times we'll recruit somebody, get them trained, and another agency will take them from us, even before the first year is up. Then we just have to start all over again."
In the past, Whitmore said, police administrations have resisted cutting positions, mainly because in the past it was done to fund other needs in the city. But he said this time the money is being used to benefit the department in a way that will help in recruitment and retention.
"The resistance came from the administration because in the past, we've always given people up, but we've never gotten them back," Whitmore said. "But this time, in order to try to recruit with better pay and to give the people who are here something, we have to do something to try to boost morale because our pay is not comparable with surrounding agencies."
According to an Arkansas Municipal League salary survey, pay for a Pine Bluff patrol officer ranked near the bottom of all cities surveyed at an average of $32,123. The average pay for officers in cities with populations of 10,000 to 20,000 people is $34,465. The statewide average for all departments is $39,186.
In Little Rock, according to the survey, the average annual salary for a patrol officer in 2019 is $53,811.
As of Oct. 31, police in Pine Bluff have dealt with 27 homicides, 84 robberies, 304 aggravated assaults, 38 cases of rape or sexual assault, 461 residential burglaries, 153 commercial burglaries, and 225 auto thefts.
FIREFIGHTERS
In the Pine Bluff Fire Department, uniformed fire personnel would receive a 5% pay increase in the coming year. But with no room to trim slots, additional raises on top of the 5% will have to wait.
According to Fire Chief Shauwn Howell, the Fire Department has 100 slots for uniformed firefighters, 90 of which are filled. But with eight of those firefighters currently in training at the Arkansas Fire Training Academy in Camden, he has an effective uniformed force of 82 people, including himself and his administrative staff.
"I've got a total of eight people in administration," Howell said in a recent interview. "That gives me an effective firefighting force of 74 people today."
That is 74 people, he said, to cover seven fire stations across three 24-hour shifts, which leaves him with 24.3 firefighters per shift. That is not nearly enough, he said, to adequately staff all seven fire stations without resorting to overtime. Overtime pay through Oct. 31 has exceeded $500,000.
To maintain staffing requirements without resorting to calling in off-duty firefighters or holding firefighters over from the previous shift, Howell said he would need 30 firefighters per shift.
"There is always someone off for vacation, or injured, or sick, requiring someone to stand in their stead for that shift," Howell said. "We plan for two on vacation but then you throw in a mixture of military obligations, one or two on some type of long-term illness or injury, and that's where the challenge is."
A big issue, he said, is recruitment and retention at the current level of compensation. Howell said that, for at least the past five years, the department has paid for training for new firefighters only to see them leave for better pay at other departments.
PAYCHECKS
Howell said the problem isn't just at the entry level. According to a 2019 salary survey obtained from the Arkansas Municipal League, salaries at all levels of service in the department lag well behind those of other cities of comparable or smaller size.
"At the senior levels I've got people who are saying, 'my salary has flatlined,'" Howell said. "'I can almost make the same amount of money in retirement.' So they retire out and I've got new guys going to bigger and better departments, so I'm losing at both ends."
Howell also noted that the job of a firefighter is much different than it used to be when fire departments handled structure fires almost exclusively. He said firefighters today must have a much higher degree of training than in the past to deal with medical emergencies, car crashes, public education programs, and other categories of service besides structure fires.
"This isn't yesterday's fire service when people might make one or two runs in a shift," he said. "But our salaries don't reflect that."
According to figures supplied by the Pine Bluff Fire Department, as of Oct. 31, the department had answered 4,406 calls for service, up from 4,309 in the same period last year. Of those calls, 123 were for structure fires, 51 for vehicle fires, and 65 for brush fires.
Other calls included 2,394 emergency medical service calls, 196 vehicle accidents with injuries, 307 alarms, 245 false calls, and 1,025 uncategorized calls.
Of the department's 4,406 service calls, only 5.43% were for fires.
The 2019 salary survey revealed that an entry-level firefighter in Pine Bluff, with a population in 2010 of just over 49,000 people, has an average base salary of $29,767. Bentonville, with 50,000 residents in 2010, pays firefighters an average of $47,122 annually. The average annual salary for a lieutenant at the Pine Bluff Fire Department is $40,408, almost $7,000 less than the average salary of a Bentonville firefighter.
The average base salary for a firefighter in Little Rock, with a 2010 population of 198,541, is $56,170, according to the salary survey. That is almost $3,000 a year more than what a battalion chief in Pine Bluff, at $53,440, would earn.
Pine Bluff's 5% raise for all uniformed personnel will increase firefighter pay to $34,333. Even with the raise, however, Pine Bluff Fire Department pay is still close to the bottom of the scale of the cities that participated in the Arkansas Municipal League salary survey.
"I'm a realist, but it's still challenging to try and say to the men and women who are still here that this is the best we can do," Howell said. "And when it comes to recruiting, to be honest, most of the people in that market are going for the highest bidder."
These budget woes are coming in spite of a feeling by officials that better days are ahead with the scheduled completion of Saracen Casino Resort set for late next summer. For now, Pine Bluff officials are still feeling the financial pinch of a shrinking tax base as they work to put together a budget for next year.
Much of the problem has to do with a population that has been in decline for two decades. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Pine Bluff population peaked at 57,400 people in 1970 and remained steady for 30 years, dropping slightly to 56,600 people in the 1980 census, then rebounding to 57,100 in the 1990 census.
But by the year 2000, the population had dropped slightly to 55,085 people, and by 2010, the population dropped below 50,000 for the first time in over 40 years with a count of 49,083 people. From that point, the population has declined dramatically, falling to an estimated 42,271 people as of July 2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's Population and Housing Units Estimates.
City Council Member Win Trafford, who chairs the Public Safety Committee, said he is committed to ensuring that both the fire and police departments reach the point that their salary schedules are competitive. Trafford, who is in his first term on the City Council, will end his term Dec. 31, 2020, and is not running for a second term.
"My thought is that I believe the majority of the council, if not all the council, knows there is a big need to get things taken care of in the fire department," Trafford said. "As we get our new revenues from gaming, especially as the larger casino is built and opened, we have to use some of those monies to get our fire department up where they need to be salary-wise."
Trafford said there are other needs that also must be met, such as uniform allowances and equipment purchases. He noted that a fully equipped new ladder truck can exceed $1 million.
"I'd like to see us get to the point where we can get rid of equipment well before its useful life has ended so that we're not constantly having to repair stuff," he said. "Right now, we're constantly having to fix things at an expensive price point and that's not good."
Trafford said the benefits of the raise for police officers should become apparent in the near term. However, he acknowledged that the city still has a ways to go to become competitive.
"We're not there yet but we'll get there," he said.
The City Council will vote Monday night on a resolution to pass the city's 2020 budget, which totals $53.4 million. Of that total, the Police Department accounts for $11 million and the Fire Department budget is $6.7 million.
State Desk on 11/30/2019