FREMONT — The Fremont City Council is exploring giving a 2% retention raise to police officers as a handful leave the city every year. A vote to consider the pay bumps passed with little upfront opposition – except for one outgoing councilwoman.
Councilman Raj Salwan this month raised the question of police pay bumps to address retention issues with full support from his colleagues, except former Councilwoman Jenny Kassan, who resigned last month. Salwan said that the city has had considerable trouble keeping cops, leading to a “critical shortage of officers,” according to his written recommendation to council.
That has led to “unsustainable overtime demands on the remaining officers,” he wrote. According to the Fremont police union president, the department has seen about eight officers leave annually for roughly the past four years, with another three expected to leave in the coming months.
Kassan criticized the council for failing to dig deeper and ask what the budgetary impacts would be for such a raise. She said she voted against the referral at the Sept. 3 meeting because, “I don’t think it was the right thing to do.”
“There was no discussion about how it would impact our budget,” Kassan told this news organization in an interview. “It was really weird. I thought the item would have a lot more discussion.”
Kassan, who served in her last council meeting on Sept. 10, added the decision to negotiate a raise across the board for the city’s most expensive department shows the city has gone “off the rails.” A raise, she said, isn’t “necessarily going to solve the vacancy problem.”
But Salwan defended his request in an interview, saying some officers “are unhappy.”
“We’re losing officers,” he said.
Currently, the Fremont Police Department, which has roughly 150 rank-and-file officers has over 30 vacancies and appears to be struggling to fill the positions.
Across the Bay Area, police agencies have said recruiting and retaining officers has become a problem, with some cities turning to bonuses as a way to lure applicants. For example, the city of Alameda offered officers a $75,000 signing bonus beginning in 2023, which accelerated the hiring of 16 officers. San Francisco offered a $5,000 bonus, San Mateo a $30,000 bonus and Hayward offered up to $20,000 in 2022 for experienced officers.
According to data reported to the city by the State Controller’s Office, Fremont in 2023 spent $146.4 million in overall wages and roughly $35 million in retirement and health benefits for a total of about $181.4 million in compensation for all city employees. Of that, the city spent $62.8 million in total compensation on police for 345 employees – the highest funded department in Fremont by a $21 million margin. The city paid $41.3 million to the fire department in the same year, by comparison.
Compared to other cities in the Bay Area, San Jose paid $364,675,369 in total compensation to its 1,951 police employees in 2023. San Francisco paid $641,466,276 to its 2,893 police employees. Oakland paid $302,935,079 to its 1,310 police employees. And Hayward paid $55,996,107 to its 330 police …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
