BuckeyeBlog

The City of Columbus Police Department is the recipient of a $12.7 million federal grant to hire or retain police officers.

The grant is supposed to pay the salary and benefits for 50 entry level officers for three years.  $12.7 million averages out to $4.23 million every year for three years.

The combined base salary of the 247 most recently hired officers working for the Columbus Police Department totals $11.5 million.  That averages out to an individual base salary of $46,559 each year.

If the federal grant covers just the base salary of a new officer the City of Columbus could afford to employee 90 officers for a three year period.  The proposal says it will cover salary and benefits for just 50 entry level officers.  If salary and benefits are paid for with $4.23 million dollars, each of those officers will take home on average $84,600 in salary and benefits pay each year.

In this scenario, the average officer is earning about $38,000 a year in benefits.  That is equivalent to 81.7% of their annual income and just $8,500 less than their yearly base salary.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 1:55 pm and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.