Hello all. I hope all of you had a great holiday season. At the police department, we had our first annual Christmas party. In years past, we have just participated in the city wide get together put on for all employees. We took a poll and folks at the police department were really excited to do our own Christmas event. It went fantastic and the attendance exceeded my expectations. Aside from police department employees, we also invited former Chiefs of Police and some other folks that had retired from our agency. We were able to do this with little to no cost to the department. We are already looking forward to making plans for next year.

An update on the hiring process as we have made some progress. As of this date, I have made offers to three candidates. Background investigations are completed on two of those candidates and they are scheduled for the next phase of the process, to include psychological evaluations, medical exams and drug screening. The third candidate will be to replace an officer who will retire on March 31st of this year. We are hoping to have that position filled shortly after our officer retires. All three candidates have done outstanding throughout the process thus far so I am hopeful they will have no problems completing the remaining phases. Two of the candidates are new to our profession so they will have to attend the Oregon Police Academy after their orientation with the department. The third candidate that will fill the vacant position caused by our retiring employee, is a lateral candidate from another state. This means he will not have to attend the 16 week academy so that will speed up the time that he will be on the road and working for us. We have been working hard to get the very best candidates available for our city.

We are also still working on replacing our existing firearms. As I mentioned months ago, our current issued firearms are at end of life and have been for some time. We have ordered the new firearms and holsters and have begun to plan for training sessions for all sworn officers. This had little impact on our budget as we were able to get credit for numerous items over a long period of time utilizing surrendered and unclaimed property items. These items over time have earned us a credit through our local firearms dealer which in turn, we have used to make the purchases needed to replace our existing firearms.

Have a great month everyone, that is all for now…