POLICE SALARIES ACCOUNT FOR 90% OF BUDGET

On the face of it, the above title isn't too worrisome. Afterall, let's face it, police work is and should be labour intensive. It should be people face to face solving problems and disputes. It should be people gathering evidence and doing interviews etc.. I don't want to see the day when police work is mostly camera and sound surveillance followed up by computer analysis of automatic surveillance.

Perhaps my concern arises from the total budget for the Waterloo Region Police. How does $126 million sound to you? I'll admit I wasn't shocked because I know how ridiculously high the annual budget for the Waterloo Region District School Board is. Soaring education costs put police costs to shame. Nevertheless first class officers make $83,156 per year and under the union contract; that, similar to the teachers pay grid, is based upon time and seniority, not necessarily performance. There are a little over 1,000 police employees in Waterloo Region. The number not mentioned is how many of them are on the "sunshine" list. This is the listing of public and civil service employees who make more than $100,000 per year and it is rising by leaps and bounds. The Waterloo Regional Police have hundreds on that list.

I fully expect that as the public's ability to pay taxes decreases that the cutoff line for the "sunshine" list will rise. Even a decade ago the numbers were tiny to what they are now. These quoted numbers are in last Wednesday's Waterloo Region Record story titled "Police wage dispute going to arbitration". While I don't know how you put a fair wage upon police work I do know that having it this much above average wages of those paying the freight is ridiculous. I also know that it is unsustainable in the long run. I also don't understand how these wages could be so high when it's the first time they've gone to arbitration. I've heard horror stories in the past as to how biased in favour of labour, arbitraters are; but these contracts were negotiated by the police union with the politically appointed police commission. In other words, directly or indirectly, our regional politicians have been selling the farm when it comes to the public picking up the tab. Thank you very much for that! Nobody wants or expects our police officers to work for minimum wage or even low wages but there is an incredible disconnect here between what they are making and what the vast majority of the rest of us are making. That widening gap needs to be closed.