Although Metro Councilman Matt Watson’s proposed property tax to raise police pay crumbled this week, some Baton Rouge officers could still see pay raises in the near future.
Mayor Sharon Weston Broome’s administration is studying the Baton Rouge Police Department’s budget with the goal of giving a pay bump to new recruits. The administration will present a preliminary plan on Tuesday in a meeting with newly-minted Police Chief Murphy Paul, which will focus on creating a broader, “comprehensive” crime-fighting plan on the heels of the most deadly year in Baton Rouge’s history.
“Certainly a pay raise, which the chief himself has said is needed, is part of our larger public safety strategy,” Broome says. “That is the first step we’re going to take on Jan. 16.”
The administration is not yet able to say how much the pay increases would be, who exactly would get them or where the money would come from, but Broome says details will become clearer in the coming week.
Also included in the broader public safety initiative will be a new violence-reduction program called Operation Ceasefire, which has been used in many other cities across the country and which BRAVE was modeled after.
If the pay plan for officers moves forward, it will be at least the third time in the past year or so that local officials were forced to scale down their initiatives after tax increases to fund them fell through.
After voters rejected a 1.5-mill tax in December 2016 to fund the Bridge Center—and Metro Council members quietly pulled a revived proposal in 2017—proponents moved forward with a much smaller initiative to divert the mentally ill from jail. Broome’s 5-mill transportation tax died at the hands of the Metro Council last year, and the mayor has announced she is moving forward with a “traffic remediation plan.” Now, Broome says she plans to hike police pay after a dedicated tax fell through.
The trend suggests local officials are entering a new era in which they must look inward to find the funds for needed programs, both because voters have shown an aversion to some of these taxes and because Metro Council members are largely unwilling to put them on the ballot in the first place.
“I think that the public and we as leaders have to look at new ways to do more with less,” Broome says. “I don’t think citizens are adverse to all tax proposals. I think it just depends on the packaging, I think it depends on the timing.”
Watson has met with Paul in recent weeks and says the new chief thinks it is “absolutely necessary” to increase police pay. But Watson also says moving forward, officials have to consider that property taxpayers want them to take money from existing dedicated millages, such as the library, East Baton Rouge Council on Aging, BREC or the Capital Area Transit System. The council should also take more time to pore over the budget, Watson says, adding that the current schedule doesn’t allow enough time to do that properly.
“I proposed this tax because we had an emergency before us, but we have to fix our financial woes not just to find a way to pay police,” Watson says. “We have other things we have to work on,” like traffic, drainage and blight.
—Sam Karlin
