Salem police, fire spending skyrocketed over 2 decades while staff stayed flat, budget data shows

Spending by Salem’s police and fire departments has soared over the last 20 years with little growth in the number of officers and firefighters responding to car crashes or crime scenes.

Two decades of city data shows that public safety staffing has barely increased as Salem’s population has grown, but spending on police and fire has increased rapidly compared with inflation.

City money spent on parks, recreation and Center 50+ has seen less growth since 2006 with minimal increase in staffing, though those services are a much smaller share of the city budget. Salem’s library spending, meantime, has not kept pace with inflation, while staffing has fallen.

Salem Reporter took a deeper look at spending and staffing across the major departments funded by Salem’s general fund, which faces a nearly $14 million budget deficit this year.

The Salem City Council on Monday unanimously voted to send a property tax levy to voters in May. They’re asking Salem residents to pay more in property taxes to fund services like the library, Center 50+ and parks maintenance. That levy, which would generate about $14 million for the city in 2026, would help fill that budget gap and soften future cuts to departments including police and fire.

If voters approve the measure, an average Salem homeowner would pay about $229 more per year in property taxes.

Salem Reporter compiled budget and staffing data back to 2006 for several city departments that have occupied much of the public discussion on the city’s budget and collectively account for nearly three-quarters of general fund spending: police, fire, parks and the library. 

Over that period, inflation rose 60% and Salem’s population grew 19%.

Key findings

• Salem police spending has grown by 125% and Salem fire’s by 154% since 2006, while the overall general fund budget has grown by 124%. Staffing has stayed largely flat for both departments during the same period.
• Parks, recreation and Center 50+ spending has grown at about the rate of inflation with almost no increase in employees. That spending is a much smaller share of the city budget.
• City costs for public safety are rising far faster than inflation, driven by increasing pension costs, benefits, collective bargaining and overtime.
• Overtime costs for fire last year were seven times what they were a decade ago and have nearly tripled for police in the same timeframe, largely due to vacant positions.
• Library spending has grown little over 20 years, and staffing is lower than it was in 2006.

The city council adopted a roughly $191 million general fund budget for 2025, which includes around $62 million for police and $51 million for fire.

The city manager’s office, legal and information technology are also paid for through the general fund.

Salem’s police and fire chiefs say the imbalance of spending and staff is largely driven by rising costs and a need to remain competitive as employers. 

Those factors have prompted the police department in recent years to pull officers away from investigating nonviolent offenses like property crimes to focus on time-intensive cases as deadly violence and fatal collisions are on the rise.

The number of calls to the fire department have also nearly doubled without adding firefighters, resulting in increasingly slower responses to emergency calls.

Both public safety leaders are relatively new to Salem – Police Chief Trevor Womack took office in 2020, and Fire Chief David Gerboth started in September 2024.

Budget strains

The Salem Police Department’s spending has more than doubled since 2006 while its staffing has grown by about 14%, from 222 people to 253.

Most of those positions are sworn officers. The number of sworn officers has fluctuated over the last 20 years, with the lowest being 186 in 2006 and the highest being 200 in 2023. Last year, the city had 196 sworn officers.

The department over the past two decades has never hit a city target of having 1.5 officers for every 1,000 Salem residents.

The ratio is often used as a standard or optimal level for West Coast law enforcement, and was supported by Salem police’s independent staffing analysis in 2021. Two decades ago, the agency was 39 officers short of the same goal as crime was rising in the city, according to a 2004 article from the Statesman Journal.

Salaries and benefits for police make up the bulk of the department’s cost. Womack said collective bargaining is one reason costs have increased disproportionately to staff.

State law requires that government agencies align their wages with those of comparable cities when negotiating union contracts.

“Officers have the choice of working anywhere they want in this state if they’re qualified, and so we have to make sure that our pay and benefits are competitive to not just attract them to Salem, but to keep them while they’re here,” Womack said. 

The city’s most recent contract for police union members included a 9% raise in 2024 and a 4% raise in 2025. The latest contract with firefighter union members included a 6% raise over 2025.

Outside of public safety jobs, most city workers got a 7% raise last July under a new union contract.

Salem police disbanded two of its teams on Jan. 1 and reassigned those officers to “support our core services on patrol,” according to agency spokeswoman Angela Hedrick. The community action unit previously patrolled downtown on bicycles and participated in youth programs and community events, and the behavioral health unit paired officers with mental health workers to respond to crisis calls.

Womack in 2023 also eliminated its last remaining detective dedicated to investigating auto theft. Now, he said, detectives only have time to investigate the most serious auto theft cases or those with obvious leads that make them easy to solve. 

Womack presented data on Feb. 4 to the city’s budget efficiencies committee which showed that among police agencies in Oregon’s eight most populous cities, Salem had the fewest number of officers per 1,000 residents with 1.10 as of last year.

In 2023, Salem also had the second-highest violent crime rate – 435.3 per 100,000 residents – of those cities, behind only Portland, according to data from the state Criminal Justice Commission. “Our officers face a more intense and dangerous work environment and do more with less every single day,” Womack said.

Both Womack and Gerboth said their agencies have no control over their growing obligation to pay for employee pensions, which has created much of the city’s budget gap. 

The state of Oregon every two years sets rates cities must pay to cover pension obligations for retired police, firefighters and civil servants. Nearly one quarter of the city’s payroll goes toward pension obligations.

Salem’s fire department spending has more than doubled since 2006 while its staff has grown by 16%, from 161 to 186 people.

In addition to employee costs, Gerboth said his agency’s material costs, such as protective and medical equipment, have also outpaced inflation.

Since 2011, the number of calls received each year by the fire department has nearly doubled from 16,679 to 33,027.

During that same period, the number of sworn firefighters on duty each day has dropped slightly from 43 to 41, Gerboth said. While overall fire department staffing has increased over two decades, he said those additions weren’t only to daily, on-duty positions.

A portion of the increase was due to the Willamette Valley Airport introducing commercial air service in October 2023, which required additional staff dedicated only to airport operations and not responding to incidents throughout the city. The fire department also hired additional staff to help manage hours worked and fill vacancies to reduce overtime.

“These changes have influenced staffing numbers without increasing the number of personnel on duty at any given time,” Gerboth said.

While the fire department’s call load has skyrocketed in recent years, its response times have slowed since 2017. The agency has a target of responding to medical emergencies within five minutes, but hit it for only half of all calls last year, compared with about 75% a decade ago.

“This delay, during a critical life threatening medical emergency or fire scenario, hinders the chances for survival from the event,” according to the city’s adopted budget for the 2025 fiscal year. 

Without enough staff to meet the growing demand, Gerboth said if firefighters need to respond to more than one call in the same fire district, engines need to be dispatched from farther away.

The scenarios city leaders have considered to balance Salem’s budget include closing a fire station in the coming years.

Gerboth said if the fire department fills its 15 vacancies and ends up having to lay off those firefighters because the city closes a fire station, “that is going to be detrimental to recruitment and retention for years to come.”

Growing spending on overtime

Salem police’s overtime spending nearly doubled between 2021 and 2024, from about $1.6 million to $2.9 million.

Womack said his agency’s overtime spending is largely driven by vacancies. 

Following the Covid pandemic and protests against the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, he said, law enforcement agencies across the U.S. saw more officers leaving the profession and fewer people applying for jobs.

But Womack told the Salem City Council in February 2024 that his department has since had a record-breaking hiring rate. He recently told Salem Reporter that they have cut their open jobs in the last two years from 26 to 13.

The city, anticipating some vacancies in every department, routinely accounts for that in its annual budget.

Womack said Salem police’s openings can vary by year based on new hires and retirements, but long-term, the agency is “gaining ground slowly towards filling all the vacancies.”

Overtime pay also becomes more expensive as new employee union contracts kick in. 

Womack said introducing specialized police services also drives up overtime costs.

This past summer, local law enforcement agencies including Salem police boosted vehicle and foot patrols in areas most vulnerable to violent crime, including neighborhoods and parks in northeast Salem and downtown. Much of that work required overtime pay, which cost around $39,000. Womack plans to resume such overtime work next summer.

“If we’re talking about any new, enhanced level of service, it’s almost completely reliant upon overtime,” he said.

Salem fire’s overtime spending has spiked since 2018, growing from around $1 million to $5.9 million by 2024. 

During the pandemic, 157 fire department employees had to take time off due to Covid, some more than once. At the peak of the pandemic’s impact, the agency had up to 23 personnel on leave at a time, according to Gerboth, the fire chief.

The fire department always has 41 firefighters on duty at any given time, working around the clock. If any are injured, sick or on vacation, their positions are generally covered by overtime pay.

Another culprit was Falck, the troubled ambulance provider that has served Salem since 2015.

Reports from the fire department showed Falck consistently failed to meet its contractually obligated staffing levels, which resulted in slower response times. To fill the gap, the fire department had to put its crews on overtime to staff agency medic units.

The issues prompted the Salem City Council last March to approve cutting ties with Falck. The city plans to bring ambulance service in-house when Falck’s contract expires in July 2025. 

Gerboth said the fire department is hiring 60 employees to provide ambulance services.

The agency also has 15 vacant firefighter positions in its budget. But with only three training staff, it doesn’t have the capacity to recruit and train that many people at a time on top of the incoming ambulance workers, Gerboth said.

He said another contributor to overtime costs is “protected leave,” such as the state’s new paid leave program that in late 2023 started providing up to 12 weeks of pay for employees to treat serious medical issues or welcome a new child. As of Feb. 10, he said the fire department had 19 employees either on paid leave through that program or on family medical leave. While they’re out, their work is generally covered through overtime staffing.

Gerboth said filling vacancies would only shift overtime costs to paying full-time employees.

“The idea that reducing overtime is going to reduce the budget is somewhat of a fallacy,” he said.

Still, Gerboth said reducing overtime is a priority. “It’s not great for the employees when we’re now requiring them to work extended hours and on their days off. It is not beneficial to recruitment and it’s really not beneficial to the health of our workforce,” he said.

Parks and libraries

Salem’s parks, recreation services and Center 50+ have seen budget growth similar to inflation. The three services have shifted departments over the years but have spent much of the last two decades in the city’s Community Services Department. They make up the bulk of the department’s spending.

Their spending has increased by 57% since 2006, from about $8 million to $12.6 million budgeted for this year.

Since 2006, staff for parks, recreation and Center 50+ has grown by about 8%.

Like the rest of the general fund, costs of parks and recreation employees have escalated faster than inflation. “Rising costs can be attributed to market-driven employee compensation, benefits and retirement commitments,” according to Josh Eggleston, the city’s chief financial officer. 

After the 2008 recession, the city eliminated several parks and recreation jobs and reduced recreation programs, including cutting aquatics. 

Parks and recreation spending has increased by about $2.9 million since 2020, in part due to the city adding the Salem Outreach and Livability Services team in 2022. The team is intended to connect homeless people with services and keep city parks safe. The parks department pays for the non-police members of the team, with five positions budgeted for this year.

Spending has grown as the city has added new parks over the years, Eggleston said. The cost of adding new parks to Salem comes from fees paid by developers, grants and other sources — not the city general fund. But once parks are added, the people and materials needed to keep them running are generally paid through the general fund.

Since 2013, the park system has expanded by over 430 acres, including the 307-acre Minto Island Conservation Area, which the city acquired in 2013. The city currently has 93 park properties totaling 2,360 acres, over half of which is its largest park, Minto-Brown Island Park, with over 1,200 acres.

The city’s parks maintenance also includes 573 acres of landscape areas, 57 paved areas such as sports courts and splash pads, 68 miles of paths, trails and walkways, and 258 pieces of play equipment, according to Eggleston.

Library spending has only slightly grown since 2006, from about $4.1 million to $5.6 million budgeted for this year. Meantime, its staff has dropped by about 25%, from 50 to 38. 

The city council voted last year to cut seven vacant library positions. Those cuts closed the main branch on Sundays and evenings, and reduced the smaller West Salem branch to two days per week.

Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053.

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