Kootenai officials raise salaries for deputies

Kootenai County Sheriff’s Deputy Ron Broesch has seen most of the guys hired along with him leave for better pay at other law enforcement agencies in the region.

And Broesch admits he too has been tempted to make the jump. Patrol deputies can earn from $5 to $15 an hour more with the Coeur d’Alene or Spokane police departments or the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office. Benefits like insurance coverage are better, too, Broesch said.

“The pull of Spokane city and Spokane County, it’s very persuasive,” said Broesch, who patrols the Hayden area.

Alarmed by the high turnover, Kootenai County officials gave 110 sheriff’s department employees a pay raise that took effect this week. Depending on years of service, they are making $1.50 to $2.50 an hour more.

It’s a big step toward making the positions more competitive in the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene corridor, Sheriff Ben Wolfinger said this week.

“When guys are going to Spokane city and the day they start they’re making $5 more an hour, and in a year they’re going to make $10 more an hour, that’s pretty hard to compete with,” Wolfinger said. “So we have to be somewhat competitive.”

In one 15-month stretch ending last November, eight Kootenai County deputies resigned to take higher-paying positions with other agencies, he said. Six joined the Spokane Police Department and two went to the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office.

Wolfinger returns to the county about half a million dollars in unused salary and benefits annually due to vacancies.

Recruiting and training replacements is expensive and time-consuming, he said. It takes almost a year before a rookie deputy is cleared to patrol solo.

“They say a patrol officer takes five years to get enough experience to really be at the top of their game,” Wolfinger said.

And just as they hit that stride is when they typically get lured away by better pay.

“It’s like you just see a cloud of dust,” Broesch said. “We lose them faster than we can replace them.”

He grew up in Coeur d’Alene and has started a family there. With four years on the job, he received a $2 hourly raise this week – and says he’s grateful for that. But he also hears from former colleagues who still make much more across the border.

“A lot of us get contacted by our buddies that work over in Spokane, and it’s like constant recruitment: ‘Hey, we’ve got an opening over here.’ … It takes a lot of resolve to consistently turn them down, and a lot of faith that this situation is going to improve,” Broesch said.

Kootenai County recently surveyed what competing agencies in the area pay officers and found that its deputies earn about 30 percent below the market average, or 16 percent below when the city of Spokane is removed from the equation.

The raises approved last month by the county Board of Commissioners – an unprecedented step midbudget year that adds about $950,000 to the annual payroll – roughly cut those margins in half.

“That’s still a significant amount, but it’s a huge first step,” Wolfinger said.

The commissioners also voted to increase special duty pay, which also lags what other agencies pay. Deputies who are on call for the dive team or SWAT now earn an extra $1 an hour, up from 50 cents. Field training officers now receive $1.50 an hour more, up from 80 cents. And a cap of $1.30 an hour for those taking on multiple special duties was lifted.

“It’s an incredible show of faith that the commissioners are willing to work on our problems,” Broesch said. “They’re hearing us and trying to fix what we perceive as broken.”

Detention deputies at the county jail were not included in the pay raises because they already earn competitive wages in the market, Wolfinger said.

He plans to ask for another, smaller wage increase for deputies and their supervisors for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

“We need to continue this moving forward,” he said. “I don’t expect to be at the top of the market. I’d just like to be in the middle. Then we can attract good people and retain good people.”

One consequence of the high turnover has been a dwindling pool of candidates for promotion to supervisory and management positions within the department, the sheriff said.

“There’s this gap in the experience level, and we’ve got to fill that gap,” Wolfinger said, noting that a lot of the top commanders are nearing retirement age.

“When you lose those experienced officers, you also lose those mentors” to the younger deputies, he said. “You should have a nice balance of new people, midrange and the gray hairs, so to speak.”

Sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Stu Miller said that overtime has increased as a result of the high turnover, though not significantly. The department has rearranged patrol schedules to reduce overtime.

Unfortunately, he said, that change has caused other problems.

“Pretty much every day you are working with a different set of deputies, which from the supervisor’s standpoint is very difficult just because if you have a deputy needing some mentoring, they are getting it from different supervisors or senior staff,” Miller said. “From a deputy’s standpoint, you work with a different group each shift so there’s little to no consistency or cohesiveness.”

Wolfinger swore in two new deputies Monday. After a few weeks of orientation, they will go to the Idaho police academy for 10 weeks of training, then return for three weeks of an in-house academy. Then they’ll spend at least 14 weeks on patrol with training officers.

If they leave before they hit four years on the job, they’re obligated to repay the county about $13,000 in training costs. But the actual cost of getting a new hire fully trained and ready is far higher, Wolfinger said.

“It’s expensive, but you wouldn’t want it any other way.”