The Baton Rouge Police Department (BRPD) will soon receive a historic raise after the East Baton Rouge Metro Council signed off on it Wednesday (April 22). It passed with 9 council members voting in favor and 3 abstaining.
All officers will receive at least a 15% raise, non-sworn employees will receive a 3.5% raise and the police chief will receive a 5.9% raise. The base pay for a sworn officer would be kicked up from about $41,000 to about $58,000 under this plan.
Implementing the raises at the mid-year point will cost the city-parish $7.5 million this year. In a full year, the raises will cost $12.5 million. The cost will increase up to about $18 million if extra officers are hired as planned.
This has been a major goal for Mayor-President Sid Edwards, who said getting raises for police officers is one of the reasons he ran for office.“My biggest reaction is how grateful I am. It is a big weight off of me,” Edwards said. “I just felt this was critically important, and I am just very grateful.”
City officials hope the raises will attract new officers to join the police department, which is currently understaffed. BRPD Chief TJ Morse said BRPD currently has 528 officers, but should have about 150 more. While the city doesn’t have the money to fill all of those positions, Morse believes they could realistically hire between 30 and 40 more officers.
He said there has already been a massive increase in interest for the department since Edwards first announced the proposal, and Edwards said getting more officers on the force was one of the main goals of the legislation.
“I’ve always said from the very beginning that the Baton Rouge Police Department was a premier law enforcement agency,” Morse said. “What was holding us back was pay. So now that we are getting up to rates that are fair and competitive, we’re going to be able to start to hire a lot more people.”
Funding for the raises will come from three main sources: changes made to city-parish health care spending, taxes overperforming estimates and self-imposed budget cuts to the police department — which was not required to make the same 7% cuts most other departments had to.
The city-parish asked its employees to switch over to Medicare Advantage, the private version of the public health care plan, in October. At the time of the changes, Batts told WRKF that the savings would mostly account for an increase in health care spending. But he said more people signed up for Advantage than expected, so there were larger savings.
Batts said the raises are possible because of the conservative fiscal choices made to address the city-parish budget deficit.
“ We were conservative with our estimates; that was the one thing. But if we didn't make those cuts, we would not be here today,” Batts said.
The other reason Edwards and other officials brought up for the raise was fear of partial dissolution.
BRPD’s officer shortage means the department doesn’t have enough active officers paying into the state’s police retirement system. Because of this, the city would have to make up the difference. It’s what costs New Orleans millions of dollars a year.
An office can be partially dissolved if it loses 50 officers in a year, or the number of officers is less than 70% of what it had the previous year. Both of these are calculated on June 30th, when the retirement system marks its fiscal year.
Ben Huxen, the executive director and general counsel at the Louisiana Municipal Police Employees’ Retirement System, said BRPD isn’t presently at risk of reaching partial dissolution.
It also may be a moot point, as a bill is working its way through the state legislature that would get rid of the process entirely.
Leading up to the vote, the decision to give raises to BRPD while excluding the rest of the parish’s employees was met with much criticism.
One of the leading voices in support of adding other parish agencies to the raises was Baton Rouge Constable Terrica Williams, whose office was excluded from the police raises. Despite initial opposition, she spoke in favor of the plan at the meeting and indicated that there was a proposal to get her deputies' raises coming before the council in three weeks.
That plan was introduced at Wednesday’s meeting and will be considered at the May 13 meeting. The cover letter that accompanies every ordinance is sparse, indicating only that it will make changes to the city-parish’s pay plan.
Council member Carolyn Coleman voted for the police to get the raise, but spent much of her time explaining her support in the context of eventually getting the rest of the city-parish employees a raise.
“The finance department, the mail room, our legislative assistants … These are the workers of this town. And I’m really tired of them being treated as the help,” Coleman said.
Councilman Anothony Keeney abstained from voting on the police raise, which he did in support of other parish employees.
“I support BRPD getting raises, but I didn’t want to leave here tonight taking care of one and not taking care of all,” Keeney said.
Officials say that not all council members have reviewed the soon-to-be-revealed plan. The mayor’s office said it will hold a press conference to announce the details of the plan on Friday (April 24).
Details of the plan were discussed in a public forum by council members and the constable, but when asked to confirm what was said, the mayor’s office declined.
“Let’s just focus on the win tonight,” Edwards said.
