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In what unfortunately has become relatively routine in Pinecrest where otherwise rare virtually anywhere else, the Village of Pinecrest and the South Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA) are once again at a labor impasse in their negotiations for a successor collective bargaining agreement (CBA), which expired October 1, 2024. Yes, the prior CBA expired nearly one full year ago. In anticipation of the CBA’s expiration, the Parties first met in April of last year, in seemingly plenty of time to work out an agreement that would be acceptable to both sides. However, various delays, including the election of new Village Council members, have delayed the process.
Ultimately, the PBA declared impasse in February of this year, but the Parties continued to negotiate in several attempts to work out an amicable resolution. Ultimately, all efforts have failed, so the case will now go to an impartial Special Magistrate to issue their opinion to both sides as to what they believe is an appropriate resolution.
As is typical in these cases, the ultimate issue comes down to money. Three years ago, the Village Council resolved most of the issues in favor of the employees, at that time granting them the use of take-home vehicles, which had been and remain standard in the industry for many years. They also bumped up salaries to try to stay competitive with other agencies in the area. At that time, it was made clear that while the Village Council’s efforts were appreciated, the total benefits package still did not rise to the level such that Pinecrest would be competitive with other departments.
The intervening years have only exacerbated this chasm with other agencies receiving extremely lucrative monetary increases that have once again left Pinecrest employees seeing their colleagues doing far better than they. This is important because it is one thing to recruit the kind of quality sworn law enforcement officers that Village residents rely on, but another to also retain those people so that they do not jump to other departments and immediately get substantial salary increases and even signing bonuses. That the Village is a participant in the Florida Retirement System (FRS) for pension benefits makes it extremely easy for an officer to jump from Pinecrest to any other department that also participates in FRS.
Recruitment and retention are ongoing issues that departments must continually deal with. Recently, while in the middle of the term of a CBA, the Cities of Margate and Wilton Manors unilaterally opened up their respective CBA’s to offer substantial raises to their officers to try to stem their issues of recruitment and retention. Just this past week, the City of Coral Gables announced the hire of 26 new officers, with 10 more to be hired by the end of the year. In addition to more competitive salaries than Pinecrest, they offer $10,000 signing bonuses. In their August 26, 2025, Commission meeting, Commissioner Melissa Castro stated that “we’re doing better in year one, but the challenge is retention. To keep officers long-term, we need to remain competitive.”
For comparison purposes, Pinecrest officers starting salary is just over $66,197 while Coral Gables is nearly $70,000, which does not include any newly negotiated increases for the upcoming fiscal year, as they are also negotiating a new CBA. The disparity is even more glaring at the top-out level, which are the most senior officers. Where Pinecrest’s maximum salary is $94,066, Coral Gables tops out at nearly $122,000, again, before upcoming increases are implemented. Pinecrest police officers are squarely in the bottom half of agencies county-wide when comparing salaries. It would take up far ess space to list those few agencies which the Village exceeds in minimum and maximum salaries to get an idea of the company the Village keeps.
The Village has explicitly acknowledged during bargaining that their salaries are lower than they should be. When the PBA proposed that the maximum salary for officers should be around $115,000, which still falls short of many other agencies in the immediate area, the Village agreed and proposed a salary scale that gave modest increases at each step of the 12-step pay plan over the course of the proposed three-year agreement, except for the very top step which they proposed to jump to $115,235, a 17.5% increase but only to the officers at the top step of the pay plan, and not until October 1, 2026.
In effect, the Village has acknowledged that their officers are underpaid by at least 17.5% but refuse to fix the problem for everyone, only those most senior of officers, and then not for over one year from now. That will not and should not mollify the vast majority of the officers in this relatively young department, who under the Village’s proposal would not see a competitive salary for many years, should they choose to stay employed in Pinecrest. Pinecrest is, in fact, a very young department overall, an effect of senior officers having already left the department for greener pastures elsewhere.
While there are other issues in contention between the Parties, including PBA-proposed changes to the promotional process to make it fairer and more transparent that the Village has refused, but make no mistake, any other issues would fall away if the Village would only be fair in providing competitive salaries that other entities are acknowledging and fixing while the men and women tasked with keeping Pinecrest residents safe lag further and further behind.
