“The job market’s kind of getting tight everywhere, including law enforcement,” Richardson said. “We’ve seen (in) the last few years ... an upswing in the amount of people that are getting into public safety either later in life or maybe (as) a second career after a military career and we didn’t want to exclude those people.”
Moraine City Council’s is scheduled to hold a second reading and a vote on establishing a maximum age limitation for an original appointment to Moraine Police Department at its next scheduled meeting Thursday. If approved, the measure would clear the way for increasing the maximum age with the statute taking effect 30 days later, he said.
Enacting the ordinance would be “in order to attract a broader range of police department applicants,” said council member Shirley Whitt.
Raising the age on new hires doesn’t mean compromising fitness standards, Richardson said.
“Regardless of age, the police and fire pension system requires a physical prior to employment and the city requires a physical,” he said. “There’s no question that if someone was in the applicant process that they would be able to do the job as long as they pass this physical. That’s part of the background check.”
That means more job availability for someone exiting the U.S. military or a corrections job in their mid to late thirties or beyond, he said.
Moraine Police Department has 29 officers and room for three more, Richardson said. Personnel levels have “always been kind of steady,” he said.
“It just fluctuates,” Richardson said. “It’s a trend that people move around now job to job including public safety — police, fire, paramedics — so we were constantly kind of hiring. It’s just part of the job cycle nowadays.”
Expanding the age range for new recruits also is a way to combat what many other police departments have been seeing, which is people joining a department, staying for a little while and then going on to another larger department somewhere else.
“Sometimes they use the smaller departments as a stepping stone to get somewhere else, so we try to combat that and we try to think of ways to help out hiring, recruitment and retention,” Richardson said.
The department had as many as 36 sworn law enforcement officers in the mid to late 2000s.
“When the economy tanked back in the late 2000s, we lost people through attrition. We didn’t lay anybody off, didn’t fire anybody, but when someone retired, we didn’t replace them, and since then we’ve been kind of steady right in this range” of high 20s to low 30s for staffing, he said.
Moraine is not the first Ohio community to seek some leeway when it comes extending the maximum age of hiring new recruits.
Dayton did so in 2021, extending the maximum hiring age for new recruits to 69 years old. Springfield city commissioners last August eliminated the maximum age restriction for new officers.
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