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Deputies looking for more competitive pay
Earlier this year, the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department lost a deputy to the Martinsville Police Department.
After 2-1/2 years of service with PCSD, the officer was able to take a job in the nearby city with an immediate $12,000 salary increase.
It’s a problem the department has faced all too often in recent years, and one that department administrators and rank-and-file officers are hoping the county can rectify.
In a special meeting of the Putnam County Council on Monday, officers laid out their case for a substantial pay increase in 2019, hopeful for consideration as budget hearings approach in September.
Shortly before the meeting was called to order, men in brown uniforms began filing in to the meeting. It made for a nearly capacity crowd with Sheriff Scott Stockton and 18 deputies (only two were absent) as well as a number of deputies’ wives and children.
“I think you guys have broken the record,” Council President Darrel Thomas said. “We’ve never had this many people in this room before.”
The united front was appropriate, considering what PCSD is proposing — a $233,115 increase in the merit deputy salary budget, up from $794,885 in 2018.
Understanding the sticker shock on an 29-percent budget increase, Lt. Doug Nally laid out how the PCSD pay scale compares to a number of neighboring departments.
The entry level salary of a Putnam County deputy is $15.44 per hour, or $32,132 annually. By comparison, a Greencastle Police officer starts at $18.18 per hour, or $37,822 annually.
In all, Nally presented starting salary information for 11 sheriff’s or police departments in nearby communities. They ranged from $18.02 ($37,481) at the Clay County Sheriff’s Department to $24.73 ($51,443) at the Danville Police Department.
Nally emphasized that many of the officers could take jobs at these departments without having to move.
Perhaps most telling was the comparison with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department, with the similarity in population of the two counties.
A Montgomery County deputy starts at $20.57, for an annual salary of $43,000, more than $10,000 more than Putnam County.
Nally went on to compare the average salary of Putnam County deputies of various ranks with the same ranks at the compared departments. Putnam County was anywhere from $5,321 to $10,883 below the average.
For department officials, though, the argument goes beyond money to a matter of safety.
Chief Deputy Phil Parker, in his next-to-last day on the job before leaving for a similar post in Clark County, laid out the battle of attrition he and Sheriff Stockton have been fighting since taking office in January 2015.
“We’ve hired 14 merit deputies (with a total of 19 positions) since we came on here,” Parker said. “So that’s 73 percent of this agency that has attritioned in three years and seven months.
“Our pay structure, has come to the point where we have had attrition,” Parker said. “It’s just become very ineffective. When you have attrition like that, it becomes a safety issue.”
Parker and Maj. Dwight Simmons explained how filling a vacancy is not simply a matter of plugging in a new person off the street.
Instead, applicants go through a selection process that involves written tests, physical conditioning, multiple interviews, a background check and a medical and psychological examination.
If they get through all of this as the top candidate, they are given a conditional offer of employment.
“They are sworn in and their training is just beginning at that point,” Parker said.
If a candidate is brand new to police work, he or she must then complete 40-hour Pre-Basic training as well as attend the 15-week course at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy.
Besides ILEA, deputies must go through an observation time of riding with other officers as well as a year as a probationary deputy.
The vacancies, the absences for training and the doubling up of officers during training makes for a lot of extra work during these times.
“When you’re field training and you’re constantly facing vacancies, these guys are working to fill shifts,” Parker said. “When you start filling those shifts that’s a safety issue because these guys are tired.”
It takes an average of 28 weeks from hiring an officer to getting him out on his own, and in the meantime, it’s a lot of fatigue for the other officers.
None of this takes into consideration the inefficiency of new employees.
“The general consensus in the police field is that three to five years is when a guy is an experienced officer,” Parker said.
That means that more than half of the current PCSD deputy roster is inexperienced.
“This is an ever-changing, situational endeavor that is only perfected by experience,” Parker said. “I love these guys. I’m proud of what they do. But they haven’t mastered their craft yet.”
The goal of the increased pay is to retain the current crop of officers, giving PCSD a more experienced roster as the years go by.
The proposed pay scale would go as follows: $39,000 for probationary officers, $44,000 for 1-5 years of experience, $49,000 for 5-10, $53,000 for 10-15, $56,000 for 15-20 and $58,000 for 20 or more years.
Additionally, ranks would come with their own pay bumps of $2,000 for a sergeant, $4,000 for a lieutenant, $6,000 for a captain, $8,000 for a major and another $3,000 for a chief (a major with 20 or more years).
The department projects that based on these scales, the salary line item would need to increase by $233,115 in 2019, followed by an estimated $9,000 in 2020, $15,000 in 2021 and $16,000 2022.
“There’s always guys moving up where they all get their time in,” Parker said.
While it would only offset a portion of the overall pay increase, Parker estimated the county will save $60,000 on the hiring process if the county begins retaining deputies at a better rate.
Sheriff’s Merit Board members Bill Newgent, Tony Detro and Larry Sutton were also in the audience, offering their support for the proposal.
“We have quality guys here and that’s what we want to keep. We can’t afford this turnover,” Newgent told the council. “As a citizen, I want to keep these guys here.”
In the end, department officials said they knew they were asking a lot of the council, but they are hoping they can work to find a solution.
“We’re just asking you to consider this,” Parker said. “I promised these guys I would see this through for them. I’m proud to do so. They deserve to be heard at least. That’s what you guys have allowed here tonight and I really appreciate that.
“We didn’t come in here to gang up on you tonight. We came to show that every one of these guys is in solidarity here,” Parker said. “We want to keep these men here. They want to raise their families here.”