Athens considers police options
By Casey Krautkramer
The village of Athens finance and personnel committee met last Thursday to discuss whether the village should hire another full-time police officer or increase the hourly wages for its part-time police officers to help retain them.
Committee chairman Cody Thorson organized the meeting to discuss how the village could give Athens Police Chief Aaron Stencil more help in filling several open shifts each month.
Stencil is the only full-time police officer in Athens and he earns a yearly salary of $75,000. He and the full-time village employees in other departments also receive a yearly stipend of $10,219 to help them pay for their own health insurance because the village doesn’t offer it.
Athens currently has five part-time police officers that earn $20 per hour but they work sparingly because of their full-time jobs outside the village.
Stencil provided the committee with two options, even though he doesn’t know yet if the village can afford them in its budget.
“I think one option is to hire a full-time police officer because I think it’s only a matter of time before this happens,” he said. “I just talked to the Owen-Withee Police Department and it just received approval to add a third full-time police officer. The other option is to increase the pay for part-time police officers to be almost the same as if we hired a new full-time police officer, to see if that makes a difference in retaining them. Beyond that, doing what we are currently doing is not working so those are the only two plausible options that I can think of. We’ve talked about doing something probably since 2016.”
The village of Athens currently has a population of 1,063 residents. The combined population of the villages of Owen and Withee is an estimated 1,440 residents.
Stencil said he can foresee losing at least two of his police department’s five parttime police officers.
“One of them has talked about resigning before so I asked him to stay until at least the Athens Fair was over,” he said. “The other one might possibly move out of the village for personal reasons.”
Stencil recommended the village either pay a new full-time police officer a yearly salary of $50,000 to $55,000 or increase the hourly pay for part-time police officers from $20 to $25.
Thorson asked Stencil if he’d be all right with a new full-time police officer earning more money than he did when he started working for the village.
“I was making $30,000 per year when I started here, so for me, it is what it is because wages are not the same today as they were 20 years ago,” Stencil said. “There are less people in the law enforcement profession today so that seems to be why the wages have increased.”
Village clerk Lisa Czech said the next step will be to see if the village can afford to hire a new full-time police officer or increase the hourly pay for its part-time police officers.
The next regular monthly village of Athens board meeting is at 7 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 23, in the new municipal hall’s board room.
