FREMONT — The Fremont City Council is exploring giving a 2% retention raise to police officers as a handful leave the city every year. A vote to consider the pay bumps passed with little upfront opposition – except for one outgoing councilwoman.
Councilman Raj Salwan this month raised the question of police pay bumps to address retention issues with full support from his colleagues, except former Councilwoman Jenny Kassan, who resigned last month. Salwan said that the city has had considerable trouble keeping cops, leading to a “critical shortage of officers,” according to his written recommendation to council.
That has led to “unsustainable overtime demands on the remaining officers,” he wrote. According to the Fremont police union president, the department has seen about eight officers leave annually for roughly the past four years, with another three expected to leave in the coming months.
Kassan criticized the council for failing to dig deeper and ask what the budgetary impacts would be for such a raise. She said she voted against the referral at the Sept. 3 meeting because, “I don’t think it was the right thing to do.”
“There was no discussion about how it would impact our budget,” Kassan told this news organization in an interview. “It was really weird. I thought the item would have a lot more discussion.”
Kassan, who served in her last council meeting on Sept. 10, added the decision to negotiate a raise across the board for the city’s most expensive department shows the city has gone “off the rails.” A raise, she said, isn’t “necessarily going to solve the vacancy problem.”
But Salwan defended his request in an interview, saying some officers “are unhappy.”
“We’re losing officers,” he said.
Currently, the Fremont Police Department, which has roughly 150 rank-and-file officers has over 30 vacancies and appears to be struggling to fill the positions.
Across the Bay Area, police agencies have said recruiting and retaining officers has become a problem, with some cities turning to bonuses as a way to lure applicants. For example, the city of Alameda offered officers a $75,000 signing bonus beginning in 2023, which accelerated the hiring of 16 officers. San Francisco offered a $5,000 bonus, San Mateo a $30,000 bonus and Hayward offered up to $20,000 in 2022 for experienced officers.
According to data reported to the city by the State Controller’s Office, Fremont in 2023 spent $146.4 million in overall wages and roughly $35 million in retirement and health benefits for a total of about $181.4 million in compensation for all city employees. Of that, the city spent $62.8 million in total compensation on police for 345 employees – the highest funded department in Fremont by a $21 million margin. The city paid $41.3 million to the fire department in the same year, by comparison.
Compared to other cities in the Bay Area, San Jose paid $364,675,369 in total compensation to its 1,951 police employees in 2023. San Francisco paid $641,466,276 to its 2,893 police employees. Oakland paid $302,935,079 to its 1,310 police employees. And Hayward paid $55,996,107 to its 330 police employees.
Fremont officers make anywhere from about $125,000 to $151,000 in base pay per year, according to the controller’s office.
The base salary range for rank-and-file officers is between $109,928 and $140,036 in San Francisco, $99,885 and $139,884 in Oakland, $124,387 to $166,633 in San Jose and $113,734 to $137,259 in Hayward, state records show.
In Fremont, a 2% raise across the board for all police employees could add another $1.26 million to the department’s total compensation annually, based on 2023’s figures.
Records also show that in 2023, the highest paid employee before adding benefits was a police officer, who made $440,121 in wages and other pay. That includes about $147,000 in regular pay and about $255,000 in overtime. That’s more than City Manager Karena Shackelford, who made $411,911, a fire captain, who made $405,324, including $194,000 in overtime pay, and police Chief Sean Washington, who made $361,249. As managers, Shackelford and Washington are not eligible for overtime.
Officer Alexander Gregory, president of the city’s police union, said the fact that the police department’s spending is so high shows that the “amount of (overtime) hours that are being worked are astronomical.”
“The demand on our officers is extremely high,” Gregory said.
Gregory noted that Hayward, a city with nearly 100,000 fewer residents, recently approved a multi-year raise for cops that makes a Hayward salary more competitive.
“In a total compensation package, the Hayward officer is making more than the Fremont officer,” Gregory said. “Obviously my concern as president is that people may put in applications to Hayward knowing that they may potentially get a pay raise by moving to another agency.”
A 2% raise, Gregory added, would only address an inflation adjustment for salaries. He said he is not sure how Salwan decided to propose the 2% raise, adding that “of course, we would like more.”
“No matter what profession you talk to, they want more than a 2% raise. But it’s obviously public funds and there’s a lot of other competing interests in the city of Fremont,” Gregory said. “We understand that sometimes more than 2% might not be feasible.”
The council approved the referral to come back to a later meeting with a 6-1 vote, with Kassan the sole dissenter. Any raise would have to be negotiated between the union and city administrators. Mayor Lily Mei did not return a request for comment on this story.
“I really didn’t think it would pass,” Kassan said. “I thought it was so outrageous.”