ORANGE BEACH, Ala. – Orange Beach is looking to beef up its police department and hopes to have four new officers on patrol in time for spring break.

Mayor Tony Kennon brought up adding the new officers at the Aug. 14 committee of the whole meeting.

“With the increased number of visitors, increased traffic where we have so many officers tied up in traffic control, there are days when we have very few officers engaged in patrol or available for response,” Kennon said. “Not that we’re not making our times, but I think we just need to be preparing to do better.”

Four years ago the city employed a force of 42, but that has dwindled to 31 due to lower revenues causing layoffs and officers going to other departments.

According to FBI statistics, a city of 5,000 to 10,000 - Orange Beach is about 6,500 - averages about 29 officers.

“By the time you knock off some for investigations, you have roughly 12 per shift which is ‘A’ shift and ‘B’ shift,” Police Chief Billy Wilkins said. “By the time you split that you have four come in early in the morning, two come in at midday and six at night. Then you have people off sick or people on vacation so even on the busiest nights the most you can count on is six at one time.”

Wilkins said though the resident population is only 6,500 there are many days in the tourist season when thousands more are in town.

“We’re more like, any day of the year, 15,000 to 20,000 and then you kick it up on a good day in the summer and its 50,000 and staffing for a city that size is 75 to 125,” he said. “We can’t staff that, I realize that. And we certainly don’t staff for the Fourth of July. But I think we get about the maximum that we can for the number of people that we have.”

Councilman Jeff Silvers said the business community is growing and city services need to expand with it.

“We have a situation here where we are growing our business and our industry and all the departments have been maxed and we have to grow with it,” Silvers said. “We have to continue to market our area to the outside that we are a safe community. And we need to have more patrol officers out there.”

Kennon said certain revenues were enacted to pay for more police and now is the time to start using it.

“Revenue is up now and numbers are up,” he said. “We also increased the cost of business licenses for short-term rentals. Part of that was to fund an officer for the beach. We raised it to help cover policing of the ordinances we had put into place. Some of that revenue has already been raised to cover that cost.”

Wilkins said if the new officers are OK’d in the upcoming budget, it’ll take time to get them ready for patrol here.

“We have to get them prepared,” he said. “If there is somebody that we choose to hire with no previous experience, they have to go through academy. If they are somewhat experienced in this area, we still have to get them acclimated to the way we do business.

“The goal is to have them where they can stand on their own two feet before March this year.”

But now is the time to act for them to be ready by spring break, Wilkins said.

“If we wait for the budget to go into effect in January, go through the hiring process, I feel like we can have them here by mid-February,” he said. “That’s why we kind of need to get a jump on it.”

Kennon hopes to develop more drug enforcement. He also suggested the city provide funding to revive drug tests at Gulf Shores High School.

He even asked, and got a positive response, for council members to be drug tested in a show of solidarity.

“As well as a drug task force, we need to bring people on so that we can move the proper people and adequately staff that,” he said. “And pretty much move into aggressive drug investigations.”

Wilkins said a lot of problems could be solved if residents simply tightened security around their homes.

“We could cut down on a lot of that if local citizens would just lock their cars at night, lock their boathouses,” he said. “That would cut down on a lot of the grief.”