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Boardman to hire three police officers
Trustees on Monday approved the hiring of three new police officers. Two officers will start in October, and another will start in January, said Trustee Larry Moliterno.
The officers are being hired with savings within the police department, and next year, those officers will remain on the township payroll thanks to the recent passage of the police levy, said Fiscal Officer William D. Leicht.
In March, two officers, Chad Doran and Bryan Butto, were hired using a one-time $413,148 federal grant that provides the starting salary for two police officers for three years and stipulates that the township pay for a fourth year, Leicht said.
The township, however, didn’t actually use money from that grant until after the 3.85-mill, five-year additional police levy was approved by voters earlier this month, he said.
“The police chief and I had talked, and there was some concern about bringing them on and not being able to pay for them past the levy and having to lay them off and then pay back the salaries that we drew [from the grant],” Leicht said.
The township instead paid for the new hires’ salary for the first six months, with the understanding that if the levy failed, the township could return the federal grant in its entirety without any penalties, he said.
A starting officer is paid $16 per hour, or about $33,000 annually, plus benefits.
“It was a gamble,” Leicht said.
Trustees also approved a new three-year contract with the Ohio Patrolman’s Benevolent Association dispatch unit. The union represents the township’s eight emergency dispatchers.
The contract has wage freezes for three years and a new tiered wage scale that increases the six-year step scale to 12 years, Township Administrator Jason Loree said.
Starting wages will be lowered from $14.89 per hour to about $11 per hour, and the dispatchers will pay more toward their health care, covering 40 percent of any increase to their premium, he said.
The trustees also discussed the $334,646 grant through the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response Program (SAFER) that the township received in February.
Trustees have said they will use the grant to recall three laid-off firefighters. Fire Chief George Brown updated the trustees and said that two of the firefighters will return and the third will not as he had found other employment.
The grant stipulates that the fire department cannot dip below 2010 firefighter staffing levels of 38, when the grant application was submitted, for the duration of the grant, which is two years.
The department has 34 firefighters, down from a high of 43, and the two recalled firefighters will bring that number up to 36, and new hires will be used to get to 38, Brown said.