Palmer PD saves fuel with longer work days

PALMER — After a year of working one-week-on and one-week-off, the Palmer Police Department says its new scheduling system is working great.

Lt. Tom Remaley said the department was asked last year to come up with ways to reduce fuel consumption. He said the first thing he did was swap his department pickup with Chief George R. Boatright’s police car.

“I drive a little more than he does because of meetings and other things and the truck gets a little less gas mileage,” he said.

But the changes didn’t stop there. The department ran the numbers and figured out that switching to two shifts instead of three — working officers 12 hours a day for seven days in a row, then giving them seven days off — would reduce the number of trips officers made from work to home. The schedule change was started as a six-month trial period, but it worked so well the department has kept the plan in place and has been on it for a little over a year.

“We reduced our fuel usage by 14 and a half percent,” Remaley said. “It’s worked out very well for us.”

That 14.5 percent, he said, is department-wide and takes into account employees like the evidence custodian and the administrative assistant. But if you look at just the police officers, the 12-hour shifts have saved more than 10 percent in fuel costs for the department.

Sara Jansen, special assistant to Palmer’s city manager, said the police department’s move was part of an overall effort to reduce fuel costs in the city.

“That was one of the things that we were charged with last year going into the budget was what can we do to save money and how can we save money on fuel costs,” she said.

The police officers, she said, were probably the most successful.

When taking a 24-hours-a-day seven-days-a-week service like the police department and juggling the schedules around, there are many things to consider.

Working 12-hour days for seven days keeps officers in tune with the community. But what happens when an officer comes in fresh from a week off? How is he supposed to come up to speed?

Remaley said they had to stagger shifts. So if, say, an officer working the day shift gets off on a Wednesday, the other officer on that shift will get off a few days later. And they started doing a shift synopsis every day so everyone knows what’s been going on lately in the community.

Another question: A 12-hour shift over seven days adds up to 84 hours in a pay period, which is four hours over what was budgeted per officer. That quickly started eating into the department’s overtime budget.

So officials shifted things around. When one officer’s work week ends, he is “short-shifted,” Remaley said, and works just eight hours instead of the usual 12.

And who gets to work nights and who has to work days? Remaley said officers swap shifts every four months. The Valdez Police Department, on which the schedule was modeled, rotates shifts more frequently, but Remaley said his officers likely wouldn’t have gone for that.

Which, of course, begs the question. How do the officers like the 12-hour shifts?

“They love it,” Remaley said. “It gives them more time with their families. If it’s hunting season, a guy can go hunting five or six days and not have to take leave to do it.”.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.