Donora restaffing police department
Additions have been made since council expressed concerns about a severe manpower shortage last month.
Donora Council has made some progress toward hiring police officers to fill its department’s ranks and has extended its search for more officers indefinitely.
In June, council talked about how hard it has been to staff the police department and fill three shifts each day as several officers quit, leaving the borough with two full-time officers including Chief Neal Rands, along with one part-timer.
At the time, Rands said there was another part-time officer who was likely to join the department soon, which would start to alleviate some of the issues.
The second full-time officer at the time was Officer Mike Parry, who has since left the department.
At this month’s council meeting, part-time Officer David Hromada was promoted to full-time status retroactive to July 1.
Hromada is not subject to the borough’s civil service test because the department is so short staffed.
“Because of our current status of having less than three full-time officers, the civil service requirement is not in effect for (Hromada’s) hire,” Solicitor Steve Toprani said. “Once we hire a third officer, that’s when we’ll begin civil service again.”
Council also hired a part-timer, Officer Michael Polinski, at a pay rate of $29.18. That’s the same rate of full-time officers, but it doesn’t come with any fringe benefits.
Last month, council decided to increase the rate for part-time officers in an effort to attract more applicants.
At the June workshop meeting, Councilman Casey Perrotta brought up increasing the part-timers’ salary from $22 to $25. Over the course of the discussion, council tossed around various rates, up to and including the $29 hourly rate full-timers make — without the benefits. Council has decided to move forward with the pay increase and will continue to seek applicants under the new rate.
The problem has been that officers were leaving the borough and nearly no new officers applied to replace them. When the borough last advertised that it would offer the civil service test, no one applied. There are currently just six students at the police academy, Rands said last month.
At the time, council members worried they might have to eliminate one of the three shifts that cover the borough to make the manpower stretch as much as it could. Former police superintendent Councilman Jim Brice expressed his concerns that officers would be unable to work back-to-back 16hour shifts repeatedly and continue to be safe.
At this month’s meeting, council said it will continue to accept applications for full-time police officers to take the civil service test indefinitely. Donora will also continue to seek part-time officers, and council said that search will remain open as needed.
“We’ll extend it indefinitely until we get our police force back up to where it should be,” Brice said.
While discussing the situation last month, council noted that one solution might be to regionalize police coverage but it wasn’t easy to think of a neighboring community that could pick up the department’s heavy workload.
Brice reported there were 293 police calls in June, leading to 25 official reports, 12 arrests and six traffic citations. The borough spent $10,731 on overtime wages in June, bringing the year’s total to $36,046.
