HONESDALE, PA — Though sufficient to cover the borough’s immediate public safety needs, the capacity of Honesdale’s police department falls short of what would be necessary to provide full 24/7 coverage. While calls have come from the public over the years to expand that capacity, the borough’s financial situation and the scale of the needed expansion puts that type of coverage effectively out of reach.

“It’s always tough to meet the expectations of the public and fit within the taxing structure that we have to fund everything,” said Honesdale Borough Mayor Derek Williams.

Borough officials interviewed by the River Reporter expressed support for the continuance and the expansion of Honesdale’s police department. However, they pointed out numerous financial impediments to significant expansion, including legacy terms in the police union’s contract, the need for the borough to compete for talent with larger departments throughout Northeast Pennsylvania and the constraints posed by Honesdale’s character as a county seat, one in which over half its property value is exempt from taxes.

Even within those constraints, officials said things could be done to expand the department. Those ideas, including taking a look at the salaries and incentives that could be offered to lure officers to the department, wouldn’t bridge the gap between the department’s current services and full-time coverage, but they would provide support for a department currently operating with minimal personnel.

The scale of the problem

Honesdale’s police department currently operates with three full-time officers—including newly-promoted Chief Don Thatcher—as well as four part-time officers, according to Williams.

The part-time officers help supplement the coverage provided by the full-time officers. With the borough’s current complement, the department has reached a place where it can once again have two officers on duty during the day, something Williams said matters for logistical purposes as well as for reasons of safety. Yet part-time officers don’t solve the problem of overnight coverage. Full-time officers can be contractually obligated to work overnight shifts; part-time officers can’t, and they have much more say over the hours of their availability.

“Right now, if we wanted to jump up to that overnight coverage that a lot of people often ask for, we’d need probably nine full-time officers,” Williams said. That decision would triple the number of full-time officers employed by the borough, something that would pose a significant challenge with the borough’s already constrained budget. 

The police department’s operating budget generally accounts for around 18 percent of the borough’s budget overall; its expenditures line in the 2025 budget came to $587,465, making up roughly 16 percent of that year’s $3.6 million budget. However, according to consultants with the Strategic Management Planning Program (STMP), “this figure is deceiving since the cost of health care for police activities and retirees is recorded in the general government accounts. Health care is projected to increase more than any other expenditures, and much of that cost is attributed to police.”

Williams estimates that the borough spends roughly half of its funds on police activities, all told. “We can pay for what we’ve got; we might be able to hire another officer or two if we can find some candidates in the next couple of years; yet the budget to have nine full-timers is most likely outside the scope of what we’re dealing with currently.”

While full-time coverage would be a financial burden, it remains an open question, in part due to the perceived need. As the county seat of Wayne County, Honesdale generates a lot more activity than the surrounding townships, with a correspondingly higher demand for police services.

“We’re all on the same page,” said Thatcher, the chief. “We’d like to cover the shifts.” Former chief Richard Southerton, who resigned in January, concurred, and both pointed to Honesdale’s status as the county seat as a driver of the need for full-time coverage, and the difficulty of relying on a state police force for coverage that is itself overstretched and not always immediately available. 

“It troubles me that we don’t cover—we can’t cover—every shift,” said interim borough manager Kevin Kundratic. “For the amount of money that we spend on police coverage—pensions, retirements and all the other benefits—it troubles me that we can’t cover every shift, but we just can’t.” He said the downtown merchants in particular suffer without the presence of a full-time police force.

Pay scales

Honesdale has attempted to hire officers over the past few years to beef up its full-time squad. These efforts have not resulted in additional officers joining the force.

“There is no incentive right now for anybody to come and be an officer in Honesdale,” said Kundratic. “There is none.”

One issue involves the pay for full-time versus part-time officers. As things stand, a full-time officer makes $5 per hour less than a part-time officer, said Kundratic. While that gets offset by benefits, which are offered to full-time and not part-time officers, it’s still a hard pill to swallow.

“Who’s gonna go from part-time to full-time when you know you’re losing five dollars an hour?” he asked. “Even though you’re getting benefits.”

Additionally, Honesdale’s pay lags behind its competitors in the Northeast Pennsylvania region. Looking at job listings for police departments in the Lackawanna Valley, their starting salaries are significantly higher than Honesdale’s, said Williams. When people are willing to travel for work, and Scranton is only 30 miles away, the limited pool of candidates that already exists will likely choose other places instead, he said.

Honesdale’s small-town charm might be able to make up some of the difference, Williams said. However, he added, the borough still needs to raise the minimum wage a bit to be competitive with the region.

Officials also mentioned the possibility of other incentives that could be employed to bring people to Honesdale. These could include some kind of compensation for a candidate to attend police academy, in exchange for a promised certain hours of service to Honesdale’s police department.

Thatcher mentioned that other departments are all in the same boat, having similar difficulties with finding candidates. He would like to put in some kind of plan or incentive to help attract people to Honesdale, he said.

Honesdale's police station shares space with the rest of the borough government in city hall.

Controlling costs

The increased salaries and incentives needed to bring candidates to Honesdale would increase the department’s cost. However, discussions have separately identified the current cost of Honesdale’s police department as an issue to be examined for its impact on the borough’s strained finances.

Honesdale Borough participated in a study conducted by the Pennsylvania Economy League in 2025, part of a statewide Strategic Management Planning Program (STMP) offered by the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development. The STMP report, delivered in October 2025, identified the police department’s benefits package as an issue that needed to be examined.

According to the STMP, the borough has provided expensive, above-and-beyond benefits to its officers in past cycles of negotiations with the police union. Some of those benefits have already been negotiated out—for example, the borough no longer provides new hires with post-retirement health insurance, as of 2020—while others have continued. Some examples include a provision allowing the borough to fund an officer’s education, a provision requiring the borough to pay overtime rates for hours worked over eight in a day and it has the minimum allowable retirement age of 50 with 25 years of service. 

The STMP recommended that the borough try and reduce costs in future rounds of negotiations with the police department. For example, it recommended, “Public employees who have the benefit of a defined benefit pension plan at the taxpayers’ expense should always be paying up to the legal maximum for that benefit, and more if it can be negotiated. Even with such a contribution, the taxpayers will be paying the vast majority of any officer’s pension, but employees should be required to pay as much as possible for their own retirement. Otherwise, the cost will be entirely on the taxpayer for a benefit of which most taxpayers can only dream.”

“The changes recommended in this report will not be easy to achieve... [but] the cost of not taking such actions will be much greater for the residents of the borough than the angst, emotion and cost of doing so,” reads the STMP. That judgment isn’t a statement on the value of the police force, but “common sense,” according to the report. “If the borough wants to control its costs going forward, it has to focus on controlling its most significant cost factors. In this case, that cost is personnel costs.”

The borough is currently in negotiations with its police union over its next contract. The department should have had a contract by January 1; Kundratic said negotiations are ongoing, with the sticking points being salaries and retirement benefits; he expects it to eventually go to arbitration, rather than being able to be worked out between the borough and the police union.

The now-moot post-retirement health benefit still costs the borough a lot of money, said Kundratic. “That’s the biggest part of the problem, is that we have a whole bunch of retirees that are using the health insurance and they’re at an age where they’re really, really using the health insurance, and so it’s just pushing those premiums up and up and up.”

Williams said the contract negotiations are currently trying to strike the right balance between incentives and compensation to make the people who come to the department want to stay, and to bring in new people.

Previous rounds of negotiations have chipped away at the historical benefits provided to the department, including that post-retirement health insurance, he said. “Of course, a lot of that is the kind of stuff that makes officers want to work here, want to continue to work here, so that juggling act is really, really tough.”

The direction of the department

At the end of the day, the nature of the borough’s police department isn’t an immutable fact. It’s a choice, one made by the people of the borough and by its public officials, through discussions on what kind of coverage the borough needs and how it can be afforded.

Southerton served with the borough as chief of police since 2014. Over the years, he said, staffing at the department dwindled, but the borough council still seemed to want the same level of service out of the department.

“I’m not sure what they want,” he said. He’s not in the position to know the financial condition of the borough, and maybe the borough can’t afford a police department, he said. However, it’s on borough officials to communicate those restrictions to the public. “Maybe the borough can’t afford that, but come out and say it.”

Williams acknowledged that it’s on him and his elected peers to tell the story of what government needs and how it can operate within its means. He said he could envision value in a town hall sometime in the next few years, bringing the community and borough government together for a heart-to-heart about what it can afford.

“You’ll hear the full spectrum at a public meeting of people who will say, like, ‘Oh, we want the full-time coverage [with] the overnight shift—whatever it takes to do that, great.’ And other times, people will come and say, ‘I don’t want to pay extra taxes for that, I’d rather the state police cover us.’ So finding the balance there is really tough,” he said.

Editor’s note: Borough council president Tiffany Rogers and public safety committee chair Jason Newbon did not return a request for comment by the print publication deadline of this article.