11-01-2021 Council Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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WS – Item 7 WORK SESSION STAFF REPORT Work Session Item 7 Date: November 1, 2021 To: City Council From: John Swenson, Public Safety Director Re: 2022 Police Division Staffing Background The Police Division currently has 26 police personnel with a budgeted authorized police staffing of 28. Of the current 26 police personnel we have one Police Sergeant assigned to light duty stemming from a work related injury, one officer on FMLA leave, and three recently hired police personnel in various stages of the field training program; thus the Police Division continues to have staffing challenges. We continue to meet our minimum staffing levels for police patrols with overtime and we anticipate one of the recently hired police officers will complete their training in December and a second completing their training in January 2022. We also anticipate the employee will return from FMLA by the end of November. Hiring of police officers continues to be challenging for all police agencies in Minnesota and we also face these challenges. In an effort to be proactive in addressing some of these hiring challenges, I propose that we delay the hiring of the 28th police officer until July 1, 2022. This delay will provide funding to: 1. Hire a third CSO. 2. Provide funding to contract with individuals to conduct police and firefighter backgrounds. There would be no additional funding requests for 2022 as part of this proposal. Hire Third CSO As we have noted in previous discussions, we have had success hiring and retaining police officers that have served as CSOs with our department. Often times our CSOs have grown up in the community and have long standing relationships that have proven to be an asset to the City and resulted in staff members that have stayed long term. We currently are in the process of hiring a CSO due the promotion of Samantha Bergeron from CSO to Police Officer this summer. We have two strong candidates for the CSO