To keep up with a wave of pending retirements from an aging
California Highway Patrol, a new $103 billion state budget has
allowed the agency to lift a 15-month hiring freeze.
To keep up with a wave of pending retirements from an aging California Highway Patrol, a new $103 billion state budget has allowed the agency to lift a 15-month hiring freeze.
One of those soon-to-be retirees is the Hollister-Gilroy division’s zealous recruiter and spokeswoman, Terry Mayes, a 21-year veteran of the CHP. She hopes to leave the force at the end of December, two months before her 50th birthday.
She insists she won’t miss it much, but it should be noted that she had tears in her eyes as she showed a recruitment video recently.
The video in question, titled “Academy Blues,” showed academy recruits being yelled at, doing push-ups on their knuckles and struggling through a mountain of bookwork during what Mayes’ fellow CHP spokesperson Brad Voyles called “six months of fun and bliss in Sacramento.” As they watched, Mayes and Voyles reminisced laughingly about how much harder the academy was in their day, but Mayes got sentimental when the video concluded with a graduation ceremony.
“I’m not staying, Brad; I’m not staying,” Mayes insisted as she wiped away tears.
Mayes joined the CHP in 1982 after prior careers as a professional golfer and a medical technologist. She originally hails from Kentucky and first visited California in the 1970s on the LPGA tour.
She was no longer winning enough to support herself on tour, she said, so she decided to go with her college degree in health sciences. She moved to California full-time in 1981 to work for a medical technology lab in San Jose.
The next year, she joined the Highway Patrol. She said she was influenced in part by her uncle, who had been a detective sergeant with the Kentucky State Police, in the controversial position of investigating organized crime.
Beyond familial admiration, however, Mayes also offered this reason:
“I have been pulled over by a number of different police agencies for speeding – I had some tickets on my record when I started – and the Highway Patrol were the most professional.”
Every recruit has a different reason for joining the CHP, but the retirement benefits are one of the biggest draws. At 50, an officer can retire and get 3 percent of his or her salary for every year worked. Mayes, who will have worked 22 years by the time she leaves, will get 66 percent of her salary for the rest of her life. After the retired officer dies, his or her next of kin gets half that pension.
A CHP officer’s pay ranges from $50,000 to $60,000 a year. That is less than the average of the state’s five largest other police departments, but the state is scheduled to meet that average in summer 2006, Mayes said. When that happens, she added, the state could lose 2,000 officers to retirement – a third of the statewide force.
That’s why they’re recruiting again.
The CHP screens more than 10,000 officer applicants a year, Mayes said, but it accepts only four 90-person classes a year into the academy. Of those 360, she said, about two-third graduate.
“The grueling portion of the academy is all about mental strength and survival,” Mayes said, but recruits also learn that their success depends on banding together as a class.
“They want you to get through it together,” Voyles said. “You cannot be a lone ranger.”
