Twenty public safety dispatchers and 11 communications center supervisors with the city of Tucson were given unexpected pay raises — which averaged out to increases of about $7,600 — in an effort to reduce the number of those employees leaving the police department for higher paying jobs elsewhere, officials said.
The pay increases, given in July but only disclosed in a recent city email, were labeled by City Manager Michael Ortega as an emergency measure and not part of the city’s annual budget, adopted by the Tucson City Council only a few weeks earlier.
Numerous vacancies have forced the city to require mandatory overtime for Tucson Police Department dispatchers, with police officials calling the staffing problems “unsustainable.” If the problem was not corrected, the situation could have the potential to “impact both services we provide to the public as well as officer safety,” according to an Aug. 17 memo from Assistant Police Chief Mark Timpf to Ortega.
“During the spring of this year, we began to see an accelerated attrition of our public safety dispatchers and despite continual efforts to hire replacements, we were unable to backfill the growing number of vacancies that were occurring,” Timpf said in his memo.
The city manager informed the council about his decision to give the pay raises in an email Sept. 12.
“The situation had become critical, and our ability to staff dispatch function within the department was becoming unsustainable. We were already experiencing disruptions in communications staffing that required us to combine frequencies to provide dispatchers for our officers,” wrote Timpf.
Outside agencies, the city learned, had begun recruiting trained dispatchers, luring them away with sizable pay increases.
A comparison of dispatcher positions at the city with other similar positions throughout the region and the state confirmed city employees were among the lowest paid in the state, Timpf wrote.
Each pay raise varied, depending on the dispatchers’ and supervisors’ years of service as well as other factors. Newly-hired city dispatchers now start at $19.24 an hour with the top of the salary range at $24.39 an hour.
Police service operators who do not dispatch calls to officers but only take calls, did not receive pay increases. However, Timpf said the pay of those operators needs to be looked at because they provide an important function to the Communications Division.
To pay for the increases, the police department eliminated six vacant dispatcher positions, going from 33 authorized dispatchers to 27, Timpf said. He said the pay raises, as of the date of his memo, had prevented further loss of dispatchers and supervisors from the department.
Ortega emphasized the pay raises were only part of finding a solution to the dispatcher turnover issues.
Roland Gutierrez, president of the union that represents Tucson police officers, said the pay raises were a good step forward for the dispatchers, but more work needs to be done in the department to address overall pay issues.
He said 17 Tucson police officers left the force last month and one of the primary reasons was better pay at other agencies.
