City holds first budget workshop

The city of Graham held its first workshop Tuesday regarding the 2022-2023 budget and tax rate. Graham City Council members heard requests from the heads of the city police, fire and public works departments.

Interim City Manager Larry Fields presented the proposed budget and tax rates to the council Tuesday, Aug. 16.

The council is still in the process of working on the budget and establishing a tax rate for the city and have planned the next budget workshop for 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 24 at the Graham Convention and Visitors Bureau meeting room. The deadline for budget and tax adoption is Friday, Sept. 30.

Graham Police Deptartment

GPD Chief Brent Bullock spoke to the council Monday regarding the police department budget in the general fund. Currently the department has 18 employees: one chief, one lieutenant, one sergeant D.A.R.E. officer, two sergeant Criminal Investigation Department officers (CIDs), three patrol sergeants, one patrol canine officer, five patrol officers, two police officers, one records supervisor, and one records clerk. Fields said one of the priorities with the budget was salaries.

“(...) The chief and I sat down and went through his department individually, and the wages that he has requested are in (the budget). It’s an average of an 8.7% increase (in salaries) to the total department. But what it does is, it gets us more competitive on being able to recruit officers and retain officers,” Fields said.

Despite budgeting for salary increases, the proposed budget for personnel services in the police department would be decreasing from $1,439,458.54 in the 2021-2022 annual budget to $1,337,296 in the proposed 2022-2023 budget.

Bullock said new officer salaries are broken down into officers which have to be sent to the academy for training and those that already have their The Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) certification.

“Currently starting out for an academy cadet is $13.73 an hour, and what we’re proposing is $16.02 an hour. (For) an officer certified with experience, right now we’re at $18.31 (an hour), and we’re looking at $21.97 (an hour),” Bullock said. “(We’re looking at) 84 hours every two weeks, because they’re working 12 hour shifts. It’s basically going from $30,000 to $35,000 on a cadet in the academy, and then we’re starting off for the certified (officers), going from $40,000 to $48,000.”

Bullock said there are currently two officers in the police academy, but altogether the department is short four officers. The chief said the department has one officer missing from each shift.

“So when we become full staff, we’ll have a total of 18 patrol officers. (...) There are some line items this year I know that we’ve gone over on, but there’s also some line items that we still have quite a bit in and most of that’s due to our staffing. And with training, that’s something, we usually try to do a lot of training we’re actually mandated to do. But this year, we haven’t been able to have as much because we’ve got people having to cover,” Bullock said.

For the full story, see the Saturday, Aug. 20 edition of The Graham Leader.