The Richmond Fire Department is so short of trained manpower that it plans to impose mandatory overtime later this month to ensure adequate coverage for fires and medical emergencies, firefighters told Richmond City Council on Monday night.

Meanwhile, the Richmond Police Department is hard-pressed to maintain patrols, a flood of police officers chimed in during the council’s public hearing on the 2021-22 budget the governing body is finalizing.

Despite mandatory overtime, there are only four police officers on a shift to cover a precinct on some days, City Council was told. In too many cases, officers either must go it alone or hold off responding because a second officer is unavailable to back them up.

“We’re not entering a crisis, we’re in a crisis,” Officer Brendan Leavy, president of the Richmond Coalition of Police, said.

He noted that 70 police officers retired or left the department in the past 10 months, which he called unprecedented. He said that’s far too many vacancies to make up with recruits with little experience at a time when Mayor Levar M. Stoney’s administration has barred the department from filling 58 vacant positions.

Despite a rough 12 months that included a pandemic and protests over racial justice, the problem is the city’s “broken pay plan,” which he and others called the real morale buster.

Joined by Keith Andes, president of Local 995 of the International Association of Fire Fighters, Officer Leavy urged City Council to scrap the mayor’s proposal to spend $2.5 million to provide a two-step increase in pay, saying that would simply throw money into a failed system.

Instead, they want council to adopt a new, simpler 20-year pay plan developed by two members of the Fire Department, Capt. Steven Hall Jr. and Battalion Chief Bailey Martin Jr. Their plan would pay sworn personnel in the fire and police departments based on rank and years of service.

The cost: $8.91 million.

While advocates for affordable housing, Carytown and police oversight called in to the hearing to urge council to add funding in those areas, the pay issue dominated the meeting.

Currently, police officers and firefighters can get no explanations for what they are paid and why one is paid less than others doing the same job.

The Hall-Martin report notes that Richmond police officers and firefighters struggle to reach top pay. Currently, 236 non-supervisory firefighters are stuck at Firefighter Level 4 and unable to move up to the top grade of master. The report also found pay inconsistencies at every rank in both departments.

The situation is being compounded by neighboring jurisdictions that are ratcheting up the pay competition, most notably in Henrico County. The county is boosting starting pay for police and firefighters to $51,913 and adding an automatic 15 percent increase for those who secure Advanced Life Saving certification.

Mr. Andes, president of Local 995, said that Richmond might not have the money to compete with Henrico, but he said the Hall-Martin plan is the city’s best shot to remain marginally competitive. He said their proposed pay plan is simpler and easy to understand.

“If you have 10 years of service, you can look at the plan and see what the pay should be,” he said. “This plan gets rid of all the complications.”

Officer Carl Scott, vice president of the Richmond Coalition of Police and the first African-American pilot in a regional air patrol unit, noted he has been with the city department for 15 years. He said he has been blocked by the freezes from moving up to the highest pay grade for non-supervisory patrol officers for four years, costing him and his family.

He loves the work, but it galls him that his county counterparts are paid $12,000 to $20,000 a year more and receive extra benefits that the city denies him, including hazard pay and a night differential.