The starting wage for a Lincoln police officer would jump to $35.85 an hour under a contract the City Council considered Monday that would raise police salaries by 17% over three years.
The contract, which the city and the Lincoln Police Union agreed upon earlier this month, would raise the salary for a first-year police officer from $70,300 to $74,568, while those who reach the highest step in the pay scale would be paid $105,414 per year.
The annual salaries for new sergeants, meanwhile, would jump from $91,300 to $96,761 under the contract. Sergeants who reach the highest step in the pay scale would be paid $122,512 per year under the contract between the city and the Lincoln Police Union, which does not cover higher-ranking supervisors like captains and lieutenants.
The proposed agreement offers other bonuses for the police force, including a $3 per hour pay bump for officers assigned to trainees and triple-time pay for officers called into work on holidays that they were scheduled to have off.
Police would also be allowed to exercise while on duty for two hour-long sessions per week under the contract that the City Council appeared inclined to approve Monday.
“I think that wellness thing is just an outstanding move,” said Councilman Tom Duden, a former police officer. “My last eight years on the police department, I never used a day of sick leave. Seven of those years, I was on bike patrol. I know it had a lot to do (with it), just staying in shape.
“When officers are healthy, they’re working hard,” he added.
The contract would also allow police 32 hours of bereavement leave if they work on the same team and during the same shift of an officer killed in the line of duty — a provision that Lincoln Police Chief Michon Morrow said she hopes the department never has to use.
“That is absolutely the goal,” she told the council Monday. “But we want to make sure that we give them time to grieve and then come back to work prepared again to serve the community.”
The council will vote on whether to approve the contract, which has an effective date of Aug. 14, next week. The city will back-pay police for the hours worked between the contract’s effective date and when the City Council approves it, Morrow said.
If the council does approve the contract, it will give Lincoln police an immediate 6% raise, along with a 6% next year and 5% the year after that.
The new starting salary for officers would be more than 18% higher than it was three years ago, when the starting salary for police officers in Lincoln was $59,377 and the department faced a chronic staffing shortage.
Both tides began to turn in 2022, when the city signed a three-year contract with the Lincoln Police Union that raised salaries by 8% and briefly made Lincoln police the highest-paid officers in the state.
Staffing has stabilized — the police department is up to 97% of its authorized strength, Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird said earlier this month — as salaries continue to rise.
Lincoln does trail Omaha in police salaries again, though.
The starting salary for an officer in Omaha is $75,379 in 2025 and will jump to $79,580 in 2026 under a contract that the city’s former mayor said was meant to “send the message that Omaha in the state of Nebraska will always be the highest paid to try to stop the bidding war,” the Omaha World-Herald reported.
Among other items before the council on Monday:
MERGER APPROVED: The council voted 6-0 to approve Gaylor Baird’s plan to combine the city-county planning and building and safety departments in a move meant to streamline the permitting and inspection processes for developers and homeowners. Councilman Bennie Shobe was absent.
The new Planning and Development Services Department, which the mayor pitched a news conference earlier this month, will begin operating as one department in October.
The cumbersome process of getting through the city’s permitting and inspection process, as well as the processes developers go through for land subdivision, zoning changes and annexation, has long been a complaint of developers — and a subject raised in local elections, including in the most recent City Council elections.
“When local government provides efficient and effective service to our development services customers we build more homes, support new and existing businesses, grow economic opportunity and save time and money,” Gaylor Baird said earlier this month.
Reach the writer at 402-473-7223 or awegley@journalstar.com. On Twitter @andrewwegley
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