The Anchorage police chief told Assembly members on Wednesday that his department's overtime budget could be better planned while he also made the case for adding 20 officers.
In the coming weeks, the department is hoping the Assembly will include money for the extra police in next year's budget -- part of the mayor's call to add more than 90 officers over five years.
"We want to continue to grow the department," said Police Chief Rob Heun, who talked about the need for more police to, for example, tackle burglaries and thefts.
He also said the department needs to be more realistic about its overtime budget, which has been overspent for at least the past nine years.
"Have we been budgeting appropriately for our overtime? ... I'd probably say no, we have not."
The chief's comments, made to only one Assembly member for much of an afternoon meeting at City Hall, followed an update on how police are combating gang problems in Anchorage.
This year, the police overtime cost is expected to exceed $6 million. That's about $3.5 million more than planned.
Money for unbudgeted overtime, which has paid for things like murder investigations and policing last May's International Whaling Commission meeting, comes significantly from funded-but-vacant jobs on the police payroll, according to the city.
THE CHALLENGE
Assemblyman Bill Starr is chairman of the Assembly budget and finance committee and is busy reviewing the mayor's spending plan, which calls for no increase in police overtime spending. "I'm concerned a little bit about the overtime levels and where they're headed," Starr said Wednesday.
Starr said he wants to see a more realistic overtime budget, one that doesn't rely on vacancies for extra funding.
Heun said a class for police trainees that starts in November could wipe out many of the vacancies, though not everyone hired is guaranteed to hit the street as a sworn police officer. It takes months to complete their training, and fewer than two-thirds of recruits have made it over the past 10 years, according to police department numbers.
If the police department budgeted to spend more on overtime and less on potentially vacant jobs -- would it lose the ability to fill those jobs in the future?
"That's exactly the challenge," said Assemblyman Matt Claman, who conducted Wednesday's meeting and supports hiring more cops as well as writing a more authentic budget.
Starr said that if the police department received funding for fewer jobs to start the year, but showed it could hire more people later in the year, the Assembly would likely approve those hires.
AVOIDING OVERTIME
Assemblyman Dick Traini said he supports hiring more police now, which he expects would help reduce overtime costs.
He said he's talked to officers who don't want to answer the phone because they're worried they'll be forced to work extra hours.
"We need to have more officers on the street, not just have the ones we have work more overtime."
Heun said that more police won't make overtime costs disappear completely -- holiday pay is unavoidable, for example. Still, he said Anchorage lags behind other cities its size when it comes to the number of police per 1,000 people. In Anchorage, that number is 1.3, while the FBI puts the average for U.S. cities with 250,000 to 500,000 people at 2.4, the police department said.
Find Kyle Hopkins' political blog online at adn.com/alaskapolitics or call him at 257-4334.
