Alachua County Commission agrees to immediate raises for deputies and correctional officers

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – At their February 25 meeting, the Alachua County Commission heard an update from their Equity Advisory Board and agreed to an immediate 3.8% raise for deputies and correctional officers.

Equity Advisory Board report

Ron Rawls, Chair of the Equity Advisory Board, presented the board’s 2024 Annual Work Plan and Accomplishments Report. Rawls said they “held nine productive meetings, during which we received insightful presentations from departments such as Community and Strategic Initiatives, Public Works, Growth Management, Fire Rescue, among others.”

Rawls continued, “One of our major accomplishments was developing the Equity Audit Tool, which we use to evaluate the housing element of a Comprehensive Plan. We also held our first listening session last month to allow the Equity Advisory Board to engage with the community and gather input on equity-related issues with the County’s programs, services, and policies.” He said more than 50 people attended and shared concerns about east side development, zoning, the East Side Activity Center, and the Gainesville Enterprise Zone. 

Rawls said the board’s plans include hearing presentations from other County departments and providing “critical feedback on inclusionary housing policies.” He says they also plan to hold future listening sessions on other topics.

Commissioner Anna Prizzia thanked him for the board’s work and said, “I think this board was created to lift up a really important issue in our community and to help us identify the ways in which we, as an institution holding public dollars, can ensure that we’re doing things for everyone in our community and not just some.”

Raises for deputies and correctional officers

Sheriff Chad Scott told the board that Alachua County Sheriff’s Office (ASO) wants to bring starting salaries from $53,000 to $55,014 for sworn law enforcement officers, certified detention officers, and certified detention deputies, along with a 3.8% raise across all steps to avoid salary compression. Scott said his agency has the funds to implement these raises for the rest of the fiscal year and asked the board to commit to raising the starting salary to $57,500 in Fiscal Year 2026, an additional 4.5% increase.

Scott Bonafide, President of the North Central Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA), said that a $60,000 starting salary is “not just fair, it’s necessary” to compete with other agencies and “reduce financial stress” for officers and their families. He said that ASO’s current starting salary of $53,000 is not competitive with agencies such as the Gainesville Police Department and Marion County Sheriff’s Office, which are at $60,000, and the UF Police Department, which will go to $60,000 in July. 

38 vacancies on the law enforcement side, 68 at the jail

ASO Major John Schabruch said ASO has 38 vacancies on the law enforcement side, with 11 cadets in academy classes and 14 sworn deputies in various phases of training; on the jail side, there are 68 vacancies with 10 in the academy and two in training. Schabruch said it’s important to all of us to fill these vacancies with “highly trained, qualified applicants… And in order to get that, you know, we’ve got to be able to compete, as far as salary goes, with the agencies surrounding us.”

Schabruch said the jail has reached out to anyone who separated from the agency in the past 36 months and offered them the step pay plan that corresponds to where they were when they left, as opposed to being treated like a new employee; he said they only started that in the past week or so, but they’ve already received some applications.

ASO Chief Financial Officer Patty Justice said that making the raise retroactive to February 1 will cost $930,000, and ASO has the funds unless they have unanticipated overtime expenses like the multiple hurricanes last fall.

Motion

Commissioner Mary Alford made a motion to direct staff to work with ASO to see what they can offer for the ’25-’26 fiscal year and also direct staff to work with ASO to “come up with a five-year salary plan so that we can kind of know what to expect going forward and we don’t have these same discussions every year.” Prizzia seconded the motion “for discussion.”

Prizzia said, “It’s really atypical for the union (PBA) to come forward and present on behalf of ASO. That’s really weird. I mean, you’re negotiating with that union for benefits and salaries,… so it’s really odd for them to come and be presenting on your behalf. It’s kind of confusing to me and… very atypical.”

Prizzia: County “can’t commit to a budget process we haven’t gone through”

Prizzia added that the County “can’t commit to a budget process we haven’t gone through,… and that also feels really difficult and frustrating.” She said she liked Alford’s motion to ask staff to work with ASO during the budget process. She said, however, that she wants law enforcement “to be the best trained folks” and she wants ASO to “be able to deal with the compression issue.” She also said it sounded like the proposed raise for FY26 is “within the amount that we are going to be doing for raises in ’25-’26, so it feels doable to say that we support that idea… but the remainder of it, I feel like, is you all asking us to do something that is beyond anything that we have ever done or would ever do, to commit to a budget item before we’ve even had our budget deliberations as a commission.”

Commissioner Ken Cornell, who was acting as Chair in Chuck Chestnut’s absence, said, “I speak for all of our Commissioners when I say we 100% support the Sheriff and support law enforcement… I do support you all getting us up to the 55 [thousand] as quickly as we can,… and so I would like nothing more than to say, ‘Yeah, let’s do this and get us to $57,500 and get us to $60,000 and then keep going as the competition in the marketplace calls for that.'”

Cornell said he supported the motion and suggested adding “a nod, not that I think they need it, but give a nod that we support the Sheriff making that adjustment mid-year, effective back to February 1.” He agreed with Prizzia that “I’ve never had a union person speak on behalf of the Sheriff to this Commission. So while I appreciate that you all are on the same page, it does make it hard when you’re negotiating.”

Cornell: “Double whammy” of falling real estate valuations and property tax reductions may be coming

Cornell added that as a realtor, he is seeing “some pretty quick shifts to the downside” in the real estate market that will affect property valuations and County revenue in coming years, “so we need to be thinking about that for the ’26-’27 year.” Cornell also mentioned Governor DeSantis’s push to reduce property taxes, which would be “a double whammy for me, when I think about ’26 and ’27, and so I want to be cautious in making any commitments.”

Undersheriff Joshua Crews said he would rephrase the request “to work responsibly within the fiscal restraints faced, to move the starting salary to where it needs to be to stay competitive within the state.”

Cornell responded, “I think you heard us all commit to that.”

Sheriff Scott said, “I just want to say that we will work with your staff on the wages, and as far as the PBA, I just want to let you know that it’s kind of odd, I know it is, but I just wanted to show you guys that we’re actually working with the PBA. We have a great relationship, as opposed to being adversaries against each other.”

Amended motion and vote

Alford added support for the immediate 3.8% increase to her motion, and Prizzia, as the seconder, said she agreed, as long as the Sheriff understood “that you’re essentially advancing a ’25-’26 raise.”

Assistant County Manager Tommy Crosby asked the Sheriff whether the $55,000 includes scheduled overtime, and Sheriff Scott said it did. 

There was no public comment on the motion, and it passed 4-0 with Chestnut absent.