Commissioners set $0.30/hour baseline for county Field Training Officer pay differential

Bonner County commissioners on Thursday directed staff to set a baseline countywide pay differential of $0.30 per hour for Field Training Officers, after a multi-hour budget workshop that weighed historical usage, departmental differences and administrative options.

The change begins with the Clerk’s Office recommendation and data review. Jessica, a Clerk's Office staff member, presented historical hours and costs for FTO differentials across departments and proposed a conservative baseline tied to typical annual usage. She told the board that the county had recorded about 6,900 FTO hours last year (across dispatch, justice services, probation, jail, sheriff’s patrol, and marine patrol) and had used about 6,100 hours so far this fiscal year; using 7,000 hours as a budgeting assumption produced an objective figure roughly equivalent to a 24-cent hourly baseline.

The discussion focused on two approaches: (1) continue paying a larger differential only when an officer is actively training (the sheriff’s request was to pay an additional $2.50 per hour…