Photo Credit: City of Beacon Police Department

At the 12/9/2024 City Council Workshop, City Administrator Chris White proposed a hiring incentive of $5,000 referral bonus and a $5,000 sign on bonus to be paid to a member of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association (PBA) who brings in a Police Officer of New York State. If approved at tonight’s City Council Meeting, this would be a pilot program and would run from January 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025, unless the City and PBA wanted to extend the program.

City Administrator Chris implied that he wanted to attract more officers from the New York Police Department (NYPD), and was interviewing one such officer now, who he hoped would spread the word to other NYPD officers if hired. “The officers are kind of a close-knit community,” City Administrator Chris told the Council, “and if we get one person from NYPD, that person has all of the contacts they worked with in the city and then can say they have a personal incentive to try to recruit them for us.”

There would be no limit to how many referral bonuses could be received if an officer was hired and stayed for 6 months. City Administrator Chris proposed: “If everything meets the requirements, they can do this numerous times, like more than one. It's not just you can only do it once if they have, like, four people and it all works out.”

People referring the officers would need to be a current member of the PBA in good standing, and would be paid after the officer stayed for 6 months. Both the referrer and the hire would be paid after the officer stayed for 6 months.

The City of Beacon’s Police Department has been short staffed for a number of years, since at least Randy Casale’s administration. The department is slated to have 36 officers, but there are currently 8 openings. Two officers are out on long-term injury; one in the academy is not available to shift yet; and another officer recently announced they are leaving for a state police job in February or March.

Per the contract with the PBA, there are minimum shift standards. If those are not met, then officers can work overtime to meet the standards. Beacon has budgeted $1 million dollars for Police overtime in the 2025 budget, City Administrator Chris explained.

Other incentives have been tried, he said, including raising wages for PBA by 5% in September, and an incentive bonus last year of $11,000. He also said they “tried to mitigate our use of overtime through allowing them to sell back vacation days.” City Administrator Chris said “if we could hire 8 people, that would cost us $880,000 and that would help to stem the the heavy use of overtime that we're forced to do just to meet the minimum shift standards.”

Going into vacation days, City Administrator Chris highlighted what they did in an old contract last year: “We had made it so that if you were here less than 7 years, you had to. If you use more than X amount of days, you had to bundle them into 5 days, and what it ended up doing was having people burn time. And for us, when somebody takes time off that they didn't need to take, it generates overtime. And instead, what we did is, we allowed them to break that up and then sell some of those days back. And that did help a little bit, but it's…unless we get more bodies in the door it's going to be hard.”

It was not clear what City Administrator Chris meant when he quantified the time as “time off that they didn’t need to take.” Since taking time off work is considered a benefit to one’s mental and physical health. Which does impact moral.

These bonuses would not be available to officers who the City hires through canvassing the Dutchess County Civil Service Police Officer list.

The full resolution can be accessed here.