Some of our members may have noticed an article in the Courant recently titled "East Hartford Panel Recommends Raise for Mayor." If not, you can find it here.
In short the panel recommended 2.5% raises for Mayor Marcia Leclerc in each of the next 2 years to $100,221, which is a bigger raise than I've seen for the Police Department over a 2 year stretch in a long time. The really interesting part of the article is the panel's reasoning for the raises, which reads;
"The panel based its recent recommendation on increases in the consumer price index of 2.1 and 2.2 percent in 2017 and 2018 and on a Connecticut Conference of Municipalities survey of town with similar populations and nearby communities, according to meeting minutes. “The mayor’s salary is significantly less than the median salary for similarly situated towns,” the minutes say. "The committee determined that the best approach would be to provide a 2.5 percent increase in each of the next two years, which would be slightly higher than the CPI for the preceding two years, but would move the salary range a little bit closer to the overall median salary for chief elected officials in strong mayor forms of government.”"
If this logic sounds familiar to you, it's because this is the same exact reasoning we've used in contract negotiations for years to ask for raises for our Membership; keeping up with inflation and bringing our salaries in line with surrounding Departments. Oddly enough whenever we've made these arguments the Town's representatives have said East Hartford is an economically depressed community and therefore the pay standards set by surrounding Towns shouldn't apply to us.
It's true that East Hartford isn't on the same financial level as Glastonbury or West Hartford, but our Finance Department routinely describes our financial position as stable so things aren't exactly falling apart either. However if we're going to use the logic of considering the pay of surrounding Towns to determine the salary of the Mayor and other Town Hall Officials, why shouldn't it apply to the Police Department as well? After all, the likelihood of our Mayor leaving East Hartford and running in South Windsor or Glastonbury for more pay is relatively low. But the issue of us not being able to attract the best candidates for our Department is very real. Across the State and the Nation the number of applicants for Police jobs is down drastically from past levels, which means more Departments are competing with each other to attract an ever shrinking pool of top qualified candidates. While EHPD does have a few nice benefits, when it comes to attracting new hires and employee retention, nothing speaks quite like cold hard cash in your hand. It wasn't that long ago that EHPD had to cancel an entrance exam due a lack of applicants.
Currently EHPD's top step Officer base pay grade is $74,209. By comparison Vernon and Manchester are paying $84,648, and $84,431 respectively. That's a significant gap that makes a huge difference in employees lives and I'd have to imagine it holds a lot of sway with a top candidate weighing their job opportunities. I don't think anyone would argue that Vernon and Manchester as Towns are particularly more well off than East Hartford. In fact I'd say they're relatively similar and neither one of them boasts a manufacturing giant like Pratt and Whitney or a successful for profit college like Goodwin on their tax rolls like East Hartford does. There doesn't seem to be a good reason why we cant be paid a competitive wage.
We're lucky enough to have a lot of really great cops at EHPD, and if we want it to stay that way, we need to keep our salaries in line with the area Departments that we're competing with for new hires as we've been asking for years. Nobody comes into our line of work looking to get rich, and it'd be pretty bad planning on their part if they did. But I don't think a fair, competitive wage is too much to ask for the value we help bring to the Town.
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