Englewood applied for a federal grant that will be used to reinstate the police impact team.

Police Chief Tom Vandermee told the city council at the March 23 meeting the application for almost $1 million over three years will allow Englewood to hire four police officers. The newly-hired officers will allow the police department to appoint four officers to re-establish the impact team, a team of officers set up to be highly visible, to identify problems or issues and work with residents and other agencies to come up with solutions.

Englewood had an impact team from 1995 to 2003 when budget issues spelled the end of the program, Vandermee said.

“The impact team was highly successful,” the police chief said. “They were out in the community daily, frequently patrolling our parks on bikes. They were a valuable asset to our community.”

Every year, the council has sought ways to come up with money in the budget to restore the impact team. Vandermee said this could be the opportunity to achieve that goal.

Councilman John Moore smiled and said restoring the impact team has been a dream he didn’t expect to see become a reality while he was on the council.

Moore and the other members of the council gave their approval for the police department to submit the appliaction.

The job of completing the application and filing it fell to Deputy Police Chief John Collins.

Collins explained the grant requires no city matching funds for the three years but does include the requirement the city guarantee salary for the newly-hired officers for the fourth year. He said the cost to the city for salaries and benefits for four officers would be about $350,000.

The city is applying for the grant through the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program titled the Hiring Recovery Program. The program received almost $550 million through the federal stimulus package.

The application is to hire four entry-level officers. The grant will fund full salary and benefits for three years. The city is responsible to cover any pay increases the newly-hired officers would receive through a city-granted pay increase for the police department.

Councilman Wayne Oakley said the grant was a good deal, even with the requirement to pay the fourth-year salaries because basically Englewood gets the services of four police officers for 25 percent of what it would require to hire them for the full four years.

He noted this was one of the issues he learned about when the Attorney General spoke to the delegates March 16 at the National League of Cities Conference and he was preparing to bring to the attention of the city.

The deadline for the application is early April.

Vandermee said the city should hear a response quickly because the U.S. Attorney General said the goal is to get money to communities as quickly as possible by processing the applications quickly and, if accepted, awarding the money within 15 days.