HONESDALE, PA — The borough of Honesdale would face challenges if it decides to expand its police department, including non-competitive salaries and a new landscape for hiring police recruits. 

That was the message the Honesdale Borough Council received from consultant Stephen Wheeler at a September 30 meeting. Wheeler has been working with the borough since 2023, helping it locate viable candidates for the police department. 

The borough is “at that juncture where we’re trying to decide what to do with the police department,” said borough manager Kevin Kudratic. 

At present, the borough only has three full-time officers in addition to Police Chief Richard Southerton, according to Mayor Derek Williams. 

A department that could provide full-time coverage—specifically overnight coverage—would need nine officers, Williams said. 

Southerton told the River Reporter that the department had that level of coverage when he first joined around 10 years ago. 

“I’ve been an advocate for a full-time department since I’ve come here,” he said. 

The borough council has not made a decision on what direction it wants to take the police department. Jason Newbon, chair of the Public Safety Committee, said the committee could meet to develop some guidance; he did not respond to a request for an update from the River Reporter. 

Wheeler’s work gives the borough the blueprints for how it could grow the department if it chose to do so. 

“We’re just trying to see what’s out there and figure out, if we move forward to grow the police department, how do we do it?” Kudratic said. 

The cost of talent

If the borough chooses to recruit additional officers, it may have to address its current rate of police department pay. 

“I’ll be very blunt with you: The salaries offered by Honesdale Borough are not really competitive with salaries in other police departments,” Wheeler said. 

The starting salary for a full-time patrol officer is $41,000 a year, according to the collective bargaining agreement hosted on the Honesdale Borough website. That goes up to $54,000 a year for a patrol officer after five years of service, with steps beyond that depending on an officer’s title and term of service. 

The mean salary for police and sheriff’s officers in non-metropolitan northern Pennsylvania is $68,280, according to May 2023 estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s around $27,000 a year more than the starting salary for Honesdale’s police officers. 

While Wheeler acknowledged that there are budgetary constraints, he said the borough should consider offering financial incentives for new recruits. 

And if it offered incentives to new employee, he added, “current employees are going to say, ‘Hey, what about me?’ That’s something the borough needs to wrestle with.”  

The total allocated to the Honesdale police department in the 2024 budget is $567,023, a figure that includes equipment and expenses. The department’s full-time salaries, including lines for a new patrol officer and overtime, add up to $307,522. 

The state of recruiting

The borough council also faces a hiring landscape that’s different from how it used to operate. “Police hiring has really changed in the last several years,” said Wheeler. 

The “severe competition for police officer candidates” means employers need to “differentiate your agency from everyone else who’s trying to hire,” Wheeler said. This could involve financial incentives, but also more creative avenues such as marketing Honesdale as a place recruits would want to live, he said. 

In addition, the old ways of reaching candidates no longer applied, he said. “We all know that people looking for employment these days, particularly the young people, generally don’t get their leads from the print newspaper.”

While Wheeler said some recruiting occurred online through social media or on jobs listings sites like Indeed, he said a majority of it happens through discussions with recruits currently in police academies. He said Lackawanna University’s police academy is “the big police training program” in the surrounding area.