East Longmeadow Police Department hopes to reduce overtime budget

Feb. 2, 2017 | Chris Goudreau
cgoudreau@thereminder.com

EAST LONGMEADOW – With the addition of new police officers coming onboard this year, the Police Department hopes to reduce its high overtime budget for fiscal year 2018 (FY18) and beyond.

Police Chief Jeff Dalessio told Reminder Publications the department hired three new officers, two of which are undergoing training at the Springfield Police Academy. The third started working as a patrolman for the department in October.

“As far as the overtime goes we continue to look at that,” he explained. “There are still holes in the staffing because these three persons are not implemented into the regular staffing until they get out of the academy. Even though we’ve hired people, they haven’t really affected the staffing other than the one person – he was put on the road right away, which has helped decrease in some of the costs in overtime. To what degree? It’s hard to say right now.”

Dalessio said the other officers would come onboard the department sometime this summer in June or July.

One of the arguments for members of the now defunct Board of Selectmen last year for deciding not to renew former Police Chief Douglas Mellis’ contract was due to the department’s high overtime budget in recent years. The selectmen originally reduced the overtime budget from $320,000 down to $200,000 for the fiscal year 2017 budget.

Citing concerns about the police overtime allocation, the Appropriations Committee recommended to increase the budget to $300,000 and to fund an additional officer position beyond the two that the selectmen  had proposed.

When asked how many additional officers would be needed in order to bring down overtime costs, Dalessio replied, “We’re always going to have overtime costs just through training and unexpected things that arise during the course of the year … If we make a move to civilian dispatch that might be able to free up some officers on the dispatching duties. If we don’t move in that direction for various reasons with other communities then we would be looking at probably an additional two officers to come onboard.”

He continued, “It’s hard to say. It depends on the level of service you want to provide to the community. Obviously, the more officers we have on staff the better were able to provide services, not just cut down the overtime, but provide different services to the town.”

Dalessio stated that if the overtime budget were reduced it would result an increase to the department’s personnel budget.  

“What’s the trade off?” he asked. “Yeah, you can lower your overtime, but in order to do that chances are you’re going to increase your personnel staffing. Your overall budget’s not going to go down … With that said, more officers [means] more better service provided to the town.”

He added he would be speaking with Town Manager Denise Menard about his department’s overtime budget when the FY18 budget process begins.

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