The City of Centralia will likely hire two additional police officers as the city council voted Tuesday night to increase police levels of service to 1.67 commissioned officers per 1,000 residents, up from the current level of 1.57 per 1,000.
While the council voted unanimously for the increase in the comprehensive plan and showed clear support for additional officers, the vote will not be finalized until the plan comes back to the board for potential adoption in July.
Before Tuesday’s meeting, the Centralia Police Department (CPD) funded 29 commissioned officers, with 24 usable officers not in or entering the academy, for a projected population of 18,510 people. The agency swore in two new officers Tuesday night.
The city council was presented with three options on its police levels of service vote: maintain the current level, increase to 1.67 officers per 1,000, or return to the 2018 adopted levels of service of 1.78 officers per 1,000.
Police Chief Andy Caldwell said during an April 22 workshop that the level of 1.67 officers per 1,000, which was the level established prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, would require two additional officers for the current population. He added that future housing developments and potential annexation could cause the need for more officers to grow.
Caldwell said Tuesday that the need for increased levels of service is not a concern of the department’s ability to respond to or prioritize calls. He would like to see a switch from its current workload where officers who should be on the streets are working overtime to finish reports in the office, and he wants to see non-commissioned officers or officers who aren’t fully commissioned handling those reports to free up officers with arresting powers.
“We live in a remarkably safe community [where] officers know how to prioritize their calls. We do end up in a place where we are primarily a reactive department, which limits our ability to be proactive,” Caldwell said. “The proactive activities are things like car stops, traffic enforcement and patrols in the parks. We do those things. It’s just we’re very limited.”
Mayor Kelly Smith Johnston was the first to express her support for the pre-pandemic levels of service and said anything higher would present “budget implications that would be very difficult for us to maintain.”
“I know that we’re looking at a difficult budget season, but I also want to keep us striving for a strong level of service. This is something the public mentions a lot is that they want to increase public safety here in our community,” she said.
In other council matters, the council voted unanimously to approve an interlocal agreement with Lewis County and 25 other jurisdictions to create and operate a joint governance of Lewis County 911, which is currently operated and governed by the county. The current governance has an advisory group comprising 26 different police departments and fire districts throughout the county called the Combined User Committee (CUC).
The CPD has had the highest 911 fees of all the users for multiple years yet only had an advisory role in operating the 911 center, according to the city’s agenda report.
The three-year interlocal agreement creates an executive board consisting of seven board members, including Smith Johnston or her designee, and, every other year, Caldwell, who will rotate yearly with Chehalis Chief of Police Randy Kaut.
Lewis County 911 has a projected operating budget of $3.6 million in 2025 and needs to create an equipment repair and replacement schedule that is estimated to cost an additional $500,000 to $750,000 per year. In 2024, Lewis County voters passed a 0.2% sales and use tax to fund 911 operations. For reference, in 2023, the 0.2% was about $4.6 million. If the sales and use tax had not passed, the CPD’s 2025 911 user fees would have been $547,516. Though the sales and use tax is expected to fully fund 911 operations for a few years, user fees are anticipated to gradually return.
