City tries to match better-paying departments
As of Sunday (Sept. 1), every Beacon police officer will receive a 5 percent raise to bring the department’s salaries more in line with neighboring jurisdictions, according to the city.
A rookie officer who would have been paid $61,683 annually under the city’s contract with the police union will now receive $64,767 under the amended agreement. In addition, increases already negotiated in the four-year contract, which expires at the end of 2025, will bring the starting salary to $66,062 beginning Jan. 1.
The department, budgeted for 36 officers, including Chief Tom Figlia, has been short-staffed off and on for years. But with seven openings and officers collectively working as many as 80 hours of overtime each week to meet the contractual requirement of four officers on each shift, the shortage has become a crisis, Figlia told the City Council on Aug. 19.
Of the 31 police officers hired in Beacon since 2014, 12 have left for better-paying jobs elsewhere, Figlia said.
According to figures provided to the council, a patrol officer in Poughkeepsie reaches his or her top pay of $106,414 after four years of service. In the Town of Poughkeepsie, it’s $113,300 after five years. In Beacon, a patrol officer hits the ceiling of $98,553 after six years. The 5 percent raise, which the council approved unanimously, brings the number to $103,481. The ceiling rises to $106,068 next year.
“We’re getting to a point where we’re no longer competitive with the departments around us,” said City Administrator Chris White. “When I negotiated the last [union] contract in 2021, inflation was 2 percent, so the raises, which were 2 or 3 percent, looked pretty good.”
The increases are “crucial to making sure the great staff that we have don’t go elsewhere because of the pay disparity,” he said. “We don’t get all the way, but it sends a message that we value the work they do.”
The city can handle the wage adjustment, “although it will tighten our budgets up,” Mayor Lee Kyriacou said. He said to expect the 2025 budget, which the council will be asked to approve in December, to be close to the state-mandated tax cap.
“We’re going to have to do this for all three of our collective bargaining agreements,” Kyriacou said, referring to the firefighters’ union and the Civil Service Employees Association, which represents city employees. He noted that development in Beacon, which last year added $27 million to the tax rolls, will need to continue to sustain the pay increases.
Municipalities in Dutchess County can only hire police officers from a list of candidates who have passed a civil service exam. Isabella Nocerino, a patrol officer sworn in Aug. 19, was Beacon’s sole hire from the last civil service list, while Poughkeepsie hired six officers, White said.
Figlia said that, in some recent years, more than 1,000 applicants have taken the civil service exam for police. But last year, fewer than 400 people did. Among those who pass, only one in four usually makes it through a rigorous background check, the chief said. He recalled taking the exam in 2004 in a Dutchess Community College cafeteria “chock full of people.”
Nationally, 47 percent more officers resigned in 2022 than in 2019, the year before the pandemic began and the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, according to a 2023 survey by the Washington, D.C.-based Police Executive Research Forum.
“We need to recognize that the last four years have been really hard on policing,” White said, recalling the retirements in July 2020 of Chief Kevin Junjulas and Capt. Gary Fredericks. “That wasn’t because of pay; that was because of anti-police sentiment. That’s played a role with all of this.”
