Oct. 31—On Monday, the Smyrna City Council is expected to vote on giving raises to a majority of its 87 police officers. Despite giving raises to city employees earlier this year, the city has struggled to retain police officers, city officials said. If approved, the city's yearly budget for police officer salaries would increase by $243,965.

Smyrna is already in the midst of conducting a pay study, conducted by the University of Georgia's Carl Vinson Institute of Government, to see how its salaries stack up against other cities. The study also aims to resolve compression, an issue where there is less difference in between employee pay scales, despite differences in experience. For instance, a newer police officer may have been hired at a salary equal to an officer who has worked for the city for years, because raises for the tenured officer did not keep pace with the rise in starting salary. To resolve compression, the tenured officer would get a raise to ensure that experience is rewarded.

Due to shortages in the police department, Smyrna asked the Carl Vinson Institute to do an early breakout of the police department and analyze where its pay stands compared to other jurisdictions (the full study will be completed eventually, and the city expects to ask the council to approve pay adjustments for other departments in January). The UGA study has already identified compression problems and indicates Smyrna needs to pay officers more to remain competitive in the labor market, officials say.

The study asked for and received the pay scales for police of all Cobb cities, though Cobb County government did not respond to the study, City Administrator Joe Bennett said. Of the 87 officers, 66 would see compression adjustments, and 35 would see pay range minimum adjustments.

"We're going to fix that by becoming the No. 1 city in Cobb County, as far as pay goes for police," Smyrna Mayor Derek Norton told the MDJ.

Depending on the position, some employees, such as the police chief, will receive no raise. Others will receive a raise of about 2%, or as high as 20%.

The starting pay for a certified officer will raise 8.5%, from $43,077 to $46,744, Bennett said.

Norton anticipates the council will approve the raises unanimously.

"If our citizens aren't safe, we got nothing, right? So, this is the number one priority," Norton said. "Everything else comes second, and we're going to take care of our people."

The raises are mostly needed because other cities are paying more, Norton said. Asked about crime rates, Bennett said there had been an increase in 2020, similar to other metro cities, but a decrease in 2021.

"We've placed a very, I guess, heavy expectation on traffic enforcement," Bennett said. "And we moved to a different ... response model, as the data-driven approach to crime and traffic safety, where we've been shifting resources around to problem areas in the city, which appears to be working quite well."

According to FBI crime statistics, Smyrna's number of violent crimes has generally hovered between 150-200 per year from 2010-2020, despite adding about 5,000 residents in that period (2021 numbers aren't yet available). In 2018, Smyrna saw its lowest violent crime rate during that decade, with 117 violent crimes. That increased to 163 in 2020 and 214 in 2020. The number in 2020 still isn't as high as 2008 (313), the highest year this century.