By Lucas Sullivan
The Dayton Daily News
DAYTON, Ohio — A record number of uniformed officers set to retire in 2011 will leave the city’s public safety departments at all-time lows as plans to replace them remain, at best, up in the air.
Forty firefighters and 40 police officers — many of them captains, lieutenants, sergeants and detectives — will retire in 2011 as part of their pension-investment agreements, city officials said.
That will leave Dayton’s public safety departments, which employ about 700 police and fire uniformed officers, at an all-time low, union officials said.
Those retiring enrolled six years ago in an eight-year Deferred Retirement Option Program (DROP), which allowed them to roll their pensions into a tax-deferred annuity and temporarily keep working.
They must retire after the eighth year to collect on their investment.
Their imminent departures couldn’t come at a worse time for the city, which faces a $20 million budget deficit in 2010 and cannot issue a civil service test to hire personnel until the U.S. Department of Justice approves a new exam.
The approval is part of a lawsuit settlement with the city and the DOJ, which said prior tests discriminated against minorities.
“It is all tied to that DOJ (lawsuit),” Fire Director Herbert Redden said. “Once we get that out of the way, we will be able to move forward.”
Maybe. It is a realistic possibility the city could not afford to hire new officers.
“There is a budgetary issue, but we have yet to determine what is a comfortable level of staffing needed,” Police Chief Richard Biehl said. “We are working to do that.
It’s my observation that the department is lean,” he said, “but I don’t know for sure what the staffing level should be.”
Union officials last week criticized city officials over their lack of preparation and said the fallout is citizens will be less safe.
“They’ve known about this for years,” fire union president Mike Fasnacht said. “Safety is what this boils down to. There is no way we can provide the same level of service with less people.
Copyright 2009 Dayton Newspapers, Inc.