The city of Mobile is taking steps to offer its police force a more competitive salary.
Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson says the city will hire a third-party consultant to examine the salary structure and find ways to make improvements. During a city council meeting yesterday, Stimpson said wages throughout the city will be examined to see where adjustments are needed.
A recent analysis from CareerTrends.com showed police officer wages in Mobile are the fourth-lowest in the country. Mobile’s average annual officer pay is just over $32,000. That’s significantly below the national average of $58,720 and even the state average of just over $41,000.
Stimpson says it’s been at least a decade since the city of Mobile has conducted a salary study, and he was surprised to learn just how low the city’s police salary ranked on a national scale. He says it could take up to a month for the city council to identify a consultant, and the study will be completed sometime next summer.
There’s an Alabama connection to this year’s Nobel Prize in physics. APR student reporter Jennifer Olsen explains it has to do with subatomic particles called neutrinos.
Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics for their work on how neutrinos oscillate. The experiment is called Double Chooz, and it uses a nuclear power plant in Chooz, France as a source of neutrinos to study.
University of Alabama graduate Shak Fernandes has worked on the experiment since 2006. He says the experiment helps explain how neutrinos work.
"Earlier in particle physics, in the standard model, it was found that, 'Ok we don’t know much about neutrinos, they probably have no mass.' But what we have proven is that because they oscillate, they have to have mass, and so that was a big breakthrough in our fundamental understanding of neutrino particle physics."
The neutrino study in France will be compared to similar work being done in China and South Korea to learn more about how neutrinos behave. For APR news, I’m Jennifer Olson in Tuscaloosa.
Ed. note: Jennifer Olson was part of a University of Alabama journalism class coached by the APR news team.
A new national housing survey is providing some insights on how Alabamians are putting a roof over their heads.
The National Multifamily Housing Council surveyed nearly one hundred and twenty thousand apartment dwellers across the nation. The survey is supposed to show what residents want to see in new homes.
Rick Haughey is the Vice President of Industry and Technology Initiatives at the Council. He says the survey provided some big clues on how Alabama renters shop around.
“The key takeaway is that we are seeing a rise in renters from millennials to boomers and it sort of fueled an evolution in apartment living and it’s raised expectations for amenities and services and that’s for residents but also for apartment owners and managers who you know really need to provide certain lifestyles for residents that they’re requiring.”
Some of the results in Alabama show Birmingham renters are loyal customers, and get a lot of their television by satellite.