Tiger Team Recommendations: Establish a Five-Year Staffing Strategy
The Village should establish a five-year staffing plan that incorporates anticipated attrition, compensation rates for new hires, outsourcing, civilianization opportunities and modeling of efficient staffing levels.
Personnel costs, staffing levels, and service offerings are some of the main drivers of the excessive operating costs of the Village. Historically, when one Village employee retires, another is hired as a replacement with little or no attempt to reengineer other employees’ duties to consolidate positions or reduce cost.
Across the Village, a significant number of employees are near or currently eligible for full-time retirement benefits. These long-term employees are at the highest end of the pay scale and it is critical for Village management to evaluate the cost-benefit for them to continue working for the Village or attempt to accelerate their retirements and replace them, if necessary, with lower cost employees. This must be facilitated under collective bargaining agreements. In order to properly evaluate this, the concessions from existing employees, as well as the terms of contracts for new hires must be known. Therefore, this analysis should be performed in conjunction with collective bargaining agreement negotiations, in collaboration with the FOB, and in alignment with the Strategic Financial Plan.
The manner in which services are delivered must be closely evaluated for every service offering throughout the Village. If the Board of Education can save hundreds of thousands of dollars by terminating the use of Village services and outsourcing them, it is only logical that the Village itself could save significantly larger amounts by doing the same. As referenced throughout this report, Village management must carefully evaluate the cost-benefit of outsourcing the delivery of all service offerings.
The analysis of all of these components requires coordination among numerous departments and Village management. In order to more effectively manage future personnel levels and compensation/benefit costs, in terms of the immediate and long-term impact, the committee believes it is critical for management to develop a five-year staffing plan.
The PD manpower is very low, there are several employees eligable to retire at anytime. Minimum manpower on patrol is down to 4 ptlman and 1 supervisor to cover the entire town, thats from Goffle and rock north to goffle and lake st all the way to the paramus and washington twnshp border near immaculate heart.and down into the lawns by hawes school including the easternmost area east of van emburg. Pretty thin don’t you think? 1 domestic dispute and your down to one person on the road and do not be bamboozeled by the response “you got lots of insde people” they arent there any more,they have been eliminated through attrition, retirements, and a firing. 4 men assigned to the bureau, who dont work 24/7 . The town needs to hire police officers now.
If that is correct, it will be confirmed when a long-term staffing evaluation/plan is done. Right now, we have no actual facts to support whether we are under-staffed or over-staffed in a particular department. By creating efficiencies through other ideas proposed in the report, we may find that historical staffing needs no longer apply. We should get this comprehensive evaluation completed quickly to understand our actual staffing needs in the future. When employees retire, we definitely need to proceed with caution before deciding to hire a replacement.
That depends on who does the staffing plan. People with no law enforcement experiance, bean counters who work in the corporate world have no buisness dictating or reccomending police staffing levels, there are actual facts, the state police ucr statffing report, which recomends 56 officers for rwd the matrix report which say 44 officers as a minimum staffing level, and that came from a company that was hired by a previous coucil, also the department roster levelof the rest of the pd’s in bergen county, last check had ridgewood at the lowest officer per resident rate in bergen. The collective barganing agreement has already been modified thru PBA cooperation to reduce starting salaries, and lower longevity payment, and lower capped sick time accumulation for new hires, yet the town has failed to take action and rehire. Who is the tiger tean and what are their qualifications to make reccomendations as to how many police are necessary to protect the village.
#3… The police department may be properly staffed. The staffing plan that the tiger team recommended does not appear to be about reducing staffing arbitrarily. From what I read, they recommended getting an understanding of pending retirements and what the necessary staffing levels in all departments should be. I don’t think they are suggesting that they should perform that evaluation. It stands to reason that any evaluation would need to involve input from appropriate personnel from the each department, who understand the needs. Of course, in the case of the police, the state UCR report is probably not the definitive reference for staffing needs in Ridgewood. I think it offers more of a guideline based on historical practices, which may or may not reflect the specific needs in Ridgewood. Nor does it take into account the long term cost of its staffing guidelines in a particular municipality, which is the most important consideration. It is quite possible that existing contracts can create a cost structure that limits potential staffing options.
The bottom line is that there are about 275 employees in town and the police are only 16% of them. Rather than laying off newer employees (as Gabbert’s budget proposes) to cut expenses, the Village should try to take advantage of normal attrition (retirement) to reduce costs according to a thoughtful plan. If a department is properly staffed or understaffed, then such a plan should have no impact or may even point to increased staffing in that department. Accordingly, this is something that employees should encourage, not resist.
#3’s point is that we don’t spend enough for police yet and the police have already done all they can do to lower costs. Anyone have any comments on that?
Last i looked the village had 44 police officers, what do they all do?
within the pd there is no fat left to trim it started with rod irwin and progressivley got smaller. So much fat has been trimmed the bone is showing.
what the police ,the fire dept’s at lest you have people. what about the d p w. they had 27 in the year 2000. they have 7 yes 7 from 27. come on. and that’s no bull shit. I’m in town for 40 years and that dept needs workers. how can the mayor or the council know this if no one tell’s them. they need to come around and talk to the worker’s.
do we need a full time manager. in my day the mayor came around and talked to the worker’s in town.
can some tell me why the EX MAYOR is around village hall a lot in the past week. what is up with that hummmmm. I smell a scam coming.
the fat is at the top . we don’t need a paid fire dept.
So tell me what scam could it be our are you smell you own rear end.
# 10 what are you a stalker? hummmmmmm.
Why don’t you ask him? It seems you are keeping track of him.
which ex- mayor pfund or killion?
Come on Dave tell us who it was.
We need good teachers. They are in the classroom every day, they don’t pad their salaries with OT. Many have master’s degrees and don’t get paid as much as a cop or firefighter in ten years.
Wrong place to be discussing teacher pay. Take it up with the Brogan (and rest of BOE), who doesn’t understand the need to reform REA contracts and pushed for another across the board increase a few months ago. The “best” teachers should be well paid. But, we need to start eliminating the dead wood and liberal contract terms. Tenure needs to go. Until tenure is eliminated and evaluations are implemented, we won’t get what we pay for from the REA.
#17 teachers work 10 months a year?