Cape City Council approves retirement upgrade

Cape Girardeau City Council members voted unanimously Tuesday to approve an upgrade to the retirement system for municipal employees.

Local Government Employees Retirement System is a state system cities have the option of buying into to provide pensions for their employees. Cape Girardeau will be upgrading from the LT-14 plan to the L6 plan, the highest available.

The move will cost $4.4 million with around $3.5 million paid as a one-time cost using a portion of the city's American Rescue Plan Act funds. The rest of the upgrade payment will be spread out over the next 20 years.

The tier increase will raise the city's LAGERS contribution from a little more than $2 million to an estimated $2.38 million in fiscal year 2023, city finance director Dustin Ziebold said in July.

The L6 tier will increase employee salary costs by an estimated $135,000 per year, according to the meeting agenda.

Both plans carry a 2% benefit multiplier, which is multiplied with the years of service and average salary from the 36 to 60 highest months in order to calculate the monthly payout for life. However, the LT-14 is a hybrid plan that drops the benefit multiplier to 1.75% after age 75.

The upgrade has been touted by city officials as a way to attract new candidates and honor current employee contributions.

"It's one (the upgrade) that clearly, I think, is going to go a long way in improving the quality of types of employees that we hire here," city manager Kenneth Haskin said at Tuesday's meeting.

"Because, you know, to keep the city running, it is a physical activity, and we've just got to make sure we are investing in our employees and staying up to market with everything else," council member Dan Presson said about the upgrade during a discussion at a council workshop in June.

"It's just a double down in our commitment to make sure that this is a quality place for people to work for long term," he added

Numerous surrounding municipalities including Cape Girardeau County and Poplar Bluff, Missouri, are already on the L6 tier.

Haskin said at Tuesday's meeting that he has had conversations with Cape Girardeau Police Chief Wes Blair about the importance of the retirement benefit improvements for officer recruitment.

Police

Earlier in the meeting, Blair presented a mid-year report for Cape Girardeau Police Department that included staffing numbers and crime statistics. The department is budgeted 107 full-time staff members, but has 84 currently, along with 12 part-time staff. The largest areas of need are in the officer and jailer ranks. The department has 67 of 80 full-time officer positions filled, with seven part-time employees. The jail has just four of 12 full-time employees and two part-time employees.

Currently, six full-time officers, one full-time communications officer and two full-time jailers are in the midst of the background process prior to hiring. However, some may not make it through the process depending on the background checks, Blair said.

Blair's presentation, which compared the first six months of 2021 to the first six months of 2022, had violent crime down 8.7%. The only statistical increase being two homicides to last year's zero at this point in the calendar.

Despite the drop in violent crime statistics, shots-fired incidents are slightly up from 52 to 54 in 2022. However, Blair credited that in part to ShotSpotter, the sensor system used in a portion of Cape Girardeau, which helps police officers detect gunfire.

"We're seeing some really good successes with that very early on," Blair said. The system began running in April.

The police chief said the system has helped make officers more efficient and helped get guns off the streets. ShotSpotter has aided officers in the recovery of seven stolen firearms, he said.

The majority of gunfire detected by ShotSpotter does not have an accompanying 911 call. Just 26% of detected gunshots had corresponding calls.

The police department has put in a request for some additional ARPA funding to help expand ShotSpotter to other areas of the city west of Arena Park.

Calls of service for the department were also down — 13.2% — this year.

Blair said the statistics were encouraging. Especially so since the department has had to grapple with budgeting and staffing shortages and negative public sentiment — not necessarily in Cape Girardeau — surrounding police as a whole across the U.S., Blair said.