The Town of Olds is looking into hiring more RCMP administrative staff after a recent report reviewing the Town’s current Municipal Policing Services Agreement.
During their report, Alberta RCMP Executive Director of Strategy Nina Sahasrabuddhe and Southern Alberta District Commander Wayne Nichols delivered updates surrounding the town’s contract, key trends, and the overall state of policing in Olds.
Town of Olds CAO Brent Williams says recruiting jumped out to him during the delegation as it has historically been a tough area for the RCMP, especially in rural detachments.
“With the retention piece and recruitment aspect of the RCMP’s uniformed officers – that has been a systemic issue in that force for several years now, they’re just not getting enough people into their organization to fill all the vacancies through retirement and regular attrition,” he says. “ When we request additional police officers, we’ve seen waits of up to one to two years for those positions to be filled, and standard vacancies are facing the same problem.”
According to Williams, the Town of Olds currently contracts 11 uniformed police officers, with five administrative members operating in a “provincial” capacity.
“We contract 11 uniformed police officers, that doesn’t mean there’s 11 in the detachment because there’s generally always vacancies due to various things like transfers or sickness,” he says. “Right now in our RCMP contract, all in, we own the police detachment and we have a mortgage on it – we’re about $2.1 to $2.2 million per year in RCMP costs, we only collect about $11.8 million in taxes, so that is a significant chunk of our annual budget in terms of our available revenue.”
In an effort to mitigate the amount of time officers are spending in the office, rather than out in the field, Williams indicates the town is looking into any opportunities to hire more administrative staff to open up availability for members on the streets.
“It’s an inevitability that we’re going to need more uniformed officers as our needs and population grows, but until those recruitment challenges are figured out by the RCMP, we’re just looking for more medium term plans,” he says. “One of the proposals that was brought forward by the local detachment and what we’re doing some background on right now is the opportunity to hire more admin staff who are still federal public service employees to help alleviate the administrative need on the uniformed officers to allow them to spend more time in the field.”
Council accepted the presentation on Monday night, and Williams indicates that any action will likely come up at a later council meeting.
