As budgeting gets under way for the coming fiscal year, town departments have been asked to submit plans that maintain their services at current levels, a departure from the “level funding” required during the worst of the financial crisis. But last week, Police Chief Ed Denmark asked the Selectmen to support a plan with a twist.
Denmark told the board that because two senior officers are retiring and will be replaced by new employees, the payroll for his eight full-time officers will drop by more than $60,000 in the coming year. But rather than pocketing the savings, he proposed that the town use the money to increase the number of officers on duty at all times to two officers per shift. The additional coverage can be achieved, Denmark said, by hiring one additional part-time officer and increasing overtime pay for the full-time staff.
Denmark said that in addition to the reasons he had outlined in the past for increasing shift coverage, the move to a regional dispatch center at Devens next year means that there will no longer be a dispatcher in Harvard on duty at all times.
“With that transition, I anticipate that many of the duties currently performed by the dispatcher will have to be done by the officer on duty,” wrote Denmark in the budget narrative required of all town departments this year. “It also means that if an officer is working alone, and has an arrest, he or she will be alone in the station with a prisoner. This presents safety issues for the officers as well as those who may end up in our custody.”
The move to two-officer coverage for all shifts, Denmark wrote “will also allow me to…implement the new policies and procedures manual, one that has been on the shelf for several years now due to our inability to adopt best practices in our police responses.”
“There has been past support for the need to have all shifts covered by two officers, but the cost increase did not allow for it to happen,” Denmark wrote. “Now, we are looking at a situation where we can finally address the much needed personnel increases without increasing our costs over last year’s appropriation.”
