ORANGE, NJ — The Orange City Council’s first hearings on Mayor Dwayne Warren’s Calendar Year 2018 Budget proposal was Friday, June 8, inside Council Chambers. South Ward Councilwoman Jamie Summers-Johnson and at large Councilwoman Adrienne Wooten were both absent.
The Orange Police Department, with Director Todd Warren; Legal Department, with city attorney Eric Pennington; and Administrative Department, with business administrator Chris Hartwyk, were addressed at the meeting with questions regarding the departments’ finances, fiscal management and cost projections for the budget.
Hartwyk and Warren answered questions from council members about the OPD’s lease purchase agreement with Enterprise Fleet Management; the status of a city employee’s salary being changed from the standard trainee’s salary; fully funding positions in the police dispatch that appear vacant; and the department’s mid-year recruiting policies.
“One of the reasons that overtime got out of control was because we anticipated 15 people in the academy and only three finished,” said Hartwyk. “Now that we’ve gotten the level of manpower to the point where it relieves overtime — and understand that every time I pay an overtime hour, I’m paying that at the time-and-a-half hourly rate of the officer. So what I anticipated here is eight, because there are three in the academy now and those eight, plus that three, will make up for the 11 that we anticipate to depart through retirement or other reasons.”
Hartwyk said the 11 new recruits will be coming on the job soon. He also said the city has spent more than $600,000 in overtime through the end of May, “so I downsized the overtime budget, based on that trend and the policies and procedures that the department administration put in place.”
Hartwyk said the OPD’s contribution to the 2018 Budget proposal tries to correct problems caused by excessive overtime in the Orange Police and Fire departments. He also said the administration is doing its best to make sure the 11 new officers expected to be hired have the cars and other equipment necessary.
“In the past, you’ve purchased cars through capital bond ordinance. My philosophy — and the mayor agrees with me — is that, if we can fund the purchase of those cars through something other than a bond ordinance, we should,” Hartwyk said. “So in the capital improvement fund, we have placed some money to bring those cars on a lease purchase basis and we’ll be entering into a fleet management contract with Enterprise Fleet Management, which is why we asked the council to approve our membership in the TIPS co-op. It is a national co-op. Enterprise is the largest fleet manager in the world and they get the best prices on vehicles from all over the country.”
North Ward Councilwoman Tency Eason answered a question on the minds of Orange public safety stakeholders leading up to the first budget hearing.
“Just so we’re clear and we don’t generate a lot of phone calls tomorrow, as of this moment … we do not anticipate any layoffs and we will do everything humanly possible make sure there are not layoffs,” said Eason on Friday, June 8. “So that everybody’s clear when they leave here at this juncture, we do not anticipate there will be any layoffs.”
But Hartwyk said he will continue negotiating for the benefit taxpayers.
“That does not mean that I’m not going to continue to ask the unions for the givebacks that I’ve been asking them for,” said Hartwyk. “It’s called negotiations.”
The next budget hearing will take place on Saturday, June 16, at 8 a.m. in Council Chambers.
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