(TRENTON) – Legislation Assembly Democrats Ralph Caputo (D-Essex), Gordon Johnson (D-Bergen) and Cleopatra Tucker (D-Essex) sponsored to help laid off police officers has received Senate approval.
The bill was approved 76-0 by the Assembly in February. An amended version was recently approved 37-0 by the Senate. The bill now returns to the Assembly for concurrence before heading to the governor’s desk.
“Giving these offices the authority to hire qualified officers without having to go through bureaucratic hurdles is good for the scores of law enforcement officers who have been laid-off in this recession but still want to work policing our streets,” Caputo said.
“Law enforcement officers who have devoted themselves to protecting our safety deserve every option we can give them if they’ve been laid-off amid this economy,” Johnson said.
“Expanding job options for our laid-off law enforcement officers is simply the right thing to do,” Tucker said. “The need to keep residents safe does not lessen during a recession.”
The bill (A-207) amends current law to add county sheriffs to the law enforcement agencies authorized to hire -without having to go through any Civil Service list of eligible employees law enforcement officers that have been laid off for reasons of economy.
The bill also supplements current law to permit state law enforcement departments and agencies to hire these law enforcement officers without having to go through any Civil Service list.
Also, the bill authorizes the appointing authority of each county correctional facility to hire county corrections officers that have been laid off by other county correctional facilities without having to go through any Civil Service list of eligible employees.
The bill would also apply to the nine state colleges or universities and to the three public research universities – Rutgers University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
The bill also establishes a special reemployment list that would permit municipalities to reappoint nonpermanent police officers who were laid off for reasons of economy.
Municipalities would be permitted to reappoint provisional police officers and police officers who were serving in a field work test period, as prescribed by the Police Training Commission, who were laid-off for reasons of economy.
A law enforcement reemployed under this bill must complete the remainder of any probationary or working test period not completed at the time of his termination.
