Projected Employee Wages & Benefits

By Mike Kanalakis

Monterey County, like the rest of the state, is finding it increasingly difficult to attract quality police recruits. If we are to stay competitive in the job market we must be prepared to find ways to attract the best applicants.

With a growing economy law enforcement in general will be hard pressed to compete with private industry in the job market. The country is already experiencing shortages in computer related jobs causing an influx of immigrants to fill these positions. We can expect difficult times ahead as we try and compete with other agencies for top candidates. Adding to the problem is the fact that law enforcement has suffered tremendous professional public image setbacks in the wake of such incidents as Rodney King, the Rampart Scandal, Waco, and Ruby Ridge. With emerging issues such as civilian review boards and racial profiling public trust is down as we try to restore public confidence in our profession. The end result is that fewer are interested in becoming police officers or Sheriff's deputies. With a diminished candidate pool we have a tremendous challenge ahead of us if we are to recruit and retain qualified people without lowering our hiring standards. Our competition is every department in the state and country including federal agencies.

So it all comes back to what do we do to recruit the best people? The simple answer is money. The cost of housing now has reached epic proportions in our county. We nned to get aggressive with recruiting. We need to recruit statewide, advertising in professional police publications, hitting job fairs, universities, and the military. When a dot com goes belly up, we shoujld be there recruiting.

We need to make some additional changes. We must streamline our hiring and selection process. It takes too long and we are loosing qualified candidates to other departments because we can't keep a steady rapid pace in the background phase. None of this is good news because our population will continue to grow along with an increased demand for public safety services. Unless we have the best trained, best equipped, and best paid law enforcement agency on the central coast we will always be a second rate operation attracting second rate applicants. In order to stay competitive some of the issues we will need to address and factor into our planning include:

• Paid medical for retirees
• Night time differential
• Paid off-duty disability insurance
• Housing subsidies for new hires
• Competitive salary increases establishing this dept by law as the highest paid in the county.

In order to put this agency out in front of the pack some bold moves will need to be taken. In order to establish the department as the best paid, the Board of Supervisors will need to pass an ordinance or the voters need approve a referendum requiring that our respective collective bargaining units be tied into salary increases of the highest paid agencies in the region as identified by the county and the bargaining units. The immediate benefit would be the elimination of controversial adversarial relationships between bargaining units and the county. Future negotiations would be reduced to smaller issues. This is not uncommon; other jurisdictions have seen the wisdom in this move.