JLCB reviews backlog of municipal police and fire supplemental-pay claims; DPS cites delayed local submissions
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Summary
The committee approved payment of back-pay supplement claims for municipal police and firefighters and questioned a backlog of high-dollar delayed submissions; the Department of Public Safety (DPS) said delays were caused by slow or incorrect agency filings, not state processing delays.
The Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget approved the payment of municipal supplemental-pay claims for police and firefighters and pressed the Department of Public Safety (DPS) on why some payments were delayed and had grown to amounts exceeding $10,000 per claimant.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert Burns, chief administrative officer for Public Safety Services, told the committee he certified funds to pay 237 police requests totaling $475,880 and 164 fire requests totaling $351,493 and that the department has available funding to make the payments.
Representative McFallon questioned why some claims took eight to 26 months to reach the department and why a subset exceeded $10,000. Burns said the delays were primarily due to the submitting local agencies and not DPS: applications were sometimes not submitted for months or had repeated errors in the online portal and were kicked back to local agencies multiple times. He said DPS staff process accepted applications within one to 17 days.
Burns described the online SumPay portal: agencies mostly upload PDFs rather than complete a typed webform, which contributes to errors that must be corrected by the submitting agency. DPS said it is evaluating a typable, web‑field submission that would check for errors before upload to reduce back-and-forth corrections.
Committee members urged DPS to work with chiefs and mayors to educate submitting agencies so officers and firefighters receive supplemental pay without multi-year delays. Burns said Chief Judice (the police-side chair of the board of review) planned outreach and training for local chiefs.
Ending: The committee approved the supplemental-pay payments as submitted and asked DPS to continue outreach and consider portal improvements to reduce processing delays and repeated rejections of local submissions.
