Honolulu Police Department seeks $10M transfer to fund overtime

The City Council Budget Committee last week gave tentative approval to a Honolulu Police Department request to transfer $10.25 million to cover salaries and wages during the last six weeks of the fiscal year due to unanticipated expenses.

The money is to come from two other police accounts.

Maj. Roland Turner, who heads HPD’s Finance Division, said the transfer is needed primarily to pay for Chief Susan Ballard’s plan to increase the department’s patrol officer presence.

A small portion, $340,000, will be used to pay for department personnel retroactively as part of the most recent collective bargaining agreement with the State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers, the police officers’ union.

A city ordinance requires Council approval of certain intradepartmental fund transfers, including those of more than $100,000.

“The department has increased the minimum amount of patrol officers that we have on patrol throughout the eight patrol districts,” Turner told the committee Monday. “To meet that minimum, it raised overtime and that has caused a greater expenditure than was budgeted for.”

Turner said HPD is still dealing with filling vacancies, another longtime issue Ballard has been trying to address.

“What we would like is (to) bring in the recruitment and keep the retention to have enough patrol officers to handle the load without having to pay for the overtime. But it’s a daunting task,” he said.

HPD is upping the number of recruit classes to four each year from its current three and increasing the number of candidates in each class to 54 from the 20 to 35 they now carry.

Resolution 19-110 now goes to the full Council for a final vote, likely on June 5.