By GLEN WERLING
The roiling discontent over losing an officer who was still in training again bubbled to the surface of Tuesday’s meeting of the Ossian Board of Metropolitan Police Commissioners.
With much reluctance board members Caleb Chichester, Bob Miller and Stan Reed agreed by a 3-0 vote to reopen the hiring process in the wake of Evan Holliday leaving the force to become a Bluffton police officer.
Holliday was — and still is — in training at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy, which as Ossian Police Chief Dave Rigney explained, is on Ossian’s “dime.”
However he did add that the City of Bluffton has agreed to reimburse Ossian for Holliday’s training.
The search process extends the period in which Ossian’s police department will continue to be understaffed, Rigney observed, as it will be impossible to get a new hire trained at ILEA until 2023.
Miller said that an exception would be if an already academy-trained officer was hired to fill the vacancy, though he didn’t hold out much hope for that.
And that’s because of the belief by Rigney and the commissioners that as the salary ordinance stands, Ossian simply cannot compete with area law enforcement agencies regarding officer pay.
“If we don’t address this and keep our salaries competitive, then the same thing will happen again,” Rigney said, adding, “We’ll get someone hired and maybe trained, but when the opportunity presents itself, they’re going to go somewhere else. If you can go five, six, seven miles down the road and get six or seven thousand dollars more a year as a young officer, who wouldn’t do that?”
Rigney and the board are hoping that implementing a pay matrix will provide some relief on that front.
Rigney and Sgt. Stephanie Tucker last year had assembled what they believed would be a workable matrix within the framework of the 2022 budget. However the Ossian Town Council members were hesitant to act on it. When renewing the salary ordinance for town employees late last year, council members agreed to an across-the-board 4 percent increase for all employees — including police officers — but took no action on the matrix.
The concern expressed by some council members was how the matrix would work within the department’s budget. They wanted more time to study its impact.
So earlier this year, the council proposed its own modifications to the submitted matrix with some downward adjustments in the proposed salary for the police chief’s position.
Those adjustments, Chichester pointed out, would mean the police chief’s position would be paid only 6 percent more than the assistant police chief’s position.
Assistant police chief is a position not filled currently on the roster.
In its first year of implementation, the revised matrix would mean a starting police officer with no experience would be paid $51,250, while the most anyone could be paid would be a police chief with 10 or more years of experience. That pay would be $69,918.81.
Once again that is in the first year of the matrix’s implementation — which Chichester and Rigney expressed they want to be this year — not next year — which Chichester said was the direction he believed the council was leaning.
If the matrix is not implemented until next year, the salaries would slip backward again, Chichester said, because the police officers would not receive the percentage increase that the council will award to every other town employee. The matrix itself would be considered the pay increase for 2023.
Chichester added, “That’s something I’m not really happy about. If the county and Bluffton give a three percent (pay increase) in 2023, then we’re…”
“Going to go backwards again,” Rigney said, finishing Chichester’s sentence. Rigney said if a percentage increase is not incorporated into the matrix, the department will again lose any competitive edge it might have had with the matrix.
Tucker added that the matrix needs to be written in hourly wages, not salary.
“It does need to be done in hourly (wages) because the salary ordinance is done in hourly (wages),” Chichester said.
Reviewing council’s suggested matrix, Chichester added, “This is probably the best chance that we’re going to get getting this passed.”
He added that Rigney was OK with the changes made to the chief’s pay.
The original matrix proposed by the commissioners ended at 25 years of experience, but he observed the council wanted to “front-load” the matrix more and in order to do that, cut the maximum pay for experience at 20 years.
The starting wage is comparable to both Bluffton and the county, Rigney added, but as it progresses it becomes less competitive.
In other business, Rigney informed the board members that higher gas prices are impinging on the department’s fuel budget. The department spent $1,323.73 during the fiscal period Feb. 16 to March 15, which is in excess of the department’s month fuel budget of $1,166.67.
“With fuel prices being what they are, we knew that was going to happen,” Rigney lamented to the commissioners.
Rigney also informed the board that he the department did stay within its salary budget for the period Feb. 20 to March 19. Rigney recorded the most overtime at 10.25 hours, followed by Tucker at 8.5 hours, Brian McClish at 5.25 hours and Russ Mounsey at 2.5 hours.
Rigney also said that he has still received no update on the progress of the department getting its new Ford Explorer patrol vehicle. He added that he was not optimistic about a June delivery date for the vehicle but Mounsey’s police car — which the new Explorer will replace — is holding up so far.
“And if something should happen to it, he could still drive the 2014 vehicle,” Chichester said.
glenw@news-banner.com
