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The majority of request for management counseling services comes from small-to-medium-sized law enforcement agencies comprised of 100 or fewer sworn personnel. This represents approximately 61.2 percent of California law enforcement agencies in the POST program. These agencies request POST management counseling services more often than larger law enforcement agencies because they lack personnel resources to conduct studies or they lack the financial resources to contract for such services. The rate of requests for these services exceeds existing staffing.
MCSB is authorized four consultant positions. However, due to periodic state hiring freezes and existing vacancies filling these positions has been problematic and protracted. Recently, two positions have been filled, and assigned personnel have begun to acquire the specific skills and knowledge required to provide substantive insight to law enforcement executives seeking the support services of POST. Despite the addition of new personnel an unacceptable backlog of requests remain, causing requesting agencies to wait up to two years for POST staff to respond. These conditions are frustrating for requesting agencies and unacceptable to POST. Staff has identified three persons with extensive law enforcement executive experience who can perform management studies. Contracting with these individuals will compress the time required to provide the needed services to requesting agencies.
POST plans to pay the contracted consultants $90.00 per hour. MCS conducts a variety of management studies but on average, each study requires 50 to 100 hours to complete. The hours needed to complete a study is dependent on the type of study and the client agencies ability to provide POST with the information and data needed to conduct analysis.
Deliverable for the contract will be specified with time lines benchmarked for each stage of the study. Before contractors are paid, studies must be complete in their entirety and be approved by the Bureau Chief of the management Counseling Services Bureau.
Negotiation a tow year contact will address the annual delay in achieving an approved budget. Given the additional resources is not an expectation of staff that the backlog in requested services will take tow years to resolve; however, a two year contract will provide latitude should the demand for management counseling service not subside in the immediate future.
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