MATTAPOISETT — Selectmen called for a decrease in a proposed $2.4 million Fiscal Year 2022 police budget at a March 2 meeting.

“The bottom line is you need to find a way to reduce your budget,” Vice Chair Jordan Collyer said to Police Chief Mary Lyons.

In the budget, Lyons asked for two new police cruisers, amounting to $110,000, and contributing to the 4.6% budget increase.

But Selectmen shot down the two cruisers, offering the potential for the purchase of one cruiser, which would be bought using capital funds.

“If we can at least get one, that would support us,” Lyons said.

Selectmen also noted that the department may have to do some long-term thinking about its budget — especially in how much it spends on overtime for its employees.

Collyer said that, factoring in officers’ vacation and sick time — which is covered by other officers working overtime — the department spends over $250,000 a year on overtime.

But Lyons said the figure was so high, in part, because higher-paid officers with longer tenure tend to do more overtime work than younger and newer officers.

The Vice Chair suggested that the department may be able to hire a floater to cover other officers’ vacations, and could potentially scale back its officer reserves, which Selectman John DeCosta noted he saw being used less and less by the department.

“We’ve always used the reserve program as sort of a recruitment process for us,” Lyons said, adding that scaling back or getting rid of it “would be a problem for us.”

Lyons also noted that it’s becoming harder and harder to get people to join as reserve officers, and likely won’t get easier when the state implements a mandate that all officers — including part-timers — will need to go through a full time police academy program.

“Recruitment in any public agency right now is tough,” DeCosta said.

Collyer suggested that the board have a separate meeting with the police department at a later date to discuss the succession order of all the positions in the department, with the idea that more officers may join the reserves if they knew they may be up for a full time position at some point.