Calvert County sheriff’s deputies have a union contract for the first time in the agency’s history, after the Board of County Commissioners, the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office and the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 109 signed a collective bargaining agreement at the board’s July 7 meeting.
The agreement, effective for fiscal year 2027, raises the starting salary for a Calvert County deputy to $70,000 annually, bringing it in line with starting pay in neighboring St. Mary’s and Charles counties. It also extends health care benefits to the surviving spouse and dependent children of a deputy who dies in the line of duty. Sheriff Ricky Cox, Sgt. Luis Kelly — president of FOP Lodge 109 — and County Administrator Linda Turner joined the commissioners for the signing.
Cox said the contract would help the department compete for recruits in a law enforcement hiring market where agencies across the region are drawing from the same limited pool of candidates. He said staff worked to ensure the agreement was competitive enough to support both recruiting and retention, adding that it benefits deputies and their families as well as the office itself.
Kelly said health care and retirement benefits had lagged behind other Southern Maryland departments and were priorities in the negotiations, alongside pay. Turner said all salary adjustments included in the agreement were already built into the county’s fiscal year 2027 budget, meaning the contract carries no additional budget impact beyond what commissioners had already approved. Commissioner Earl Hance thanked the sheriff’s office for its work, telling deputies the county considers itself the safest in Maryland in part because of them.
The agreement will be renegotiated every two years and includes an “open clause” allowing either side to reopen specific provisions if issues arise before the next scheduled negotiation.
Tuesday’s signing is a direct result of state legislation that took effect less than a year ago. Senate Bill 767, sponsored by state Sen. Michael Jackson and signed by Gov. Wes Moore on April 22, 2025, granted full-time deputy sheriffs and correctional deputies in the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office — through the rank of major — the right to organize and bargain collectively for the first time. The law took effect Oct. 1, 2025, and Tuesday’s agreement is the first contract negotiated under it.
Calvert County had been something of an outlier among Maryland’s larger sheriff’s offices in not offering deputies collective bargaining rights. Montgomery County’s sheriff’s deputies have held that right under county code for years, and several other Maryland jurisdictions have pursued similar legislation for their own sheriff’s offices, with mixed success; a comparable bill for Washington County Sheriff’s Office employees stalled this year after missing the legislature’s bill-drafting deadline. Jackson also sponsored a companion measure, Senate Bill 271, extending Maryland Tort Claims Act coverage to employees of the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office, which the governor signed the same day as SB 767.
The push for bargaining rights and the resulting pay increase come as the Calvert County Sheriff’s Office, like many law enforcement agencies nationally, competes for applicants amid long-running recruitment pressure. The department maintains an ongoing hiring process for deputy sheriff candidates, who must pass a written exam, physical ability test, oral interview, polygraph examination, background investigation and psychological screening before being placed on an eligibility list for future vacancies. Surrounding jurisdictions have leaned on incentives of their own to attract candidates; Anne Arundel County, for instance, has advertised signing bonuses of up to $10,000 for lateral entry deputies this year. By matching the $70,000 starting salary already offered in St. Mary’s and Charles counties, Calvert officials said they hope to keep the department competitive without losing candidates to neighboring agencies offering similar or better pay.
The sheriff’s office has periodically restructured its pay scale in recent years, including adding the rank of major to accommodate departmental growth, as it has worked to build staffing levels following strategic planning efforts that date back more than a decade.
Calvert County joins a small number of Maryland counties where sheriff’s deputies now have formal collective bargaining rights, a shift labor advocates and law enforcement groups have pushed for statewide in recent years, arguing that deputies in the state’s non-charter counties historically had fewer negotiating protections than officers in municipal police departments or charter counties with established bargaining laws. The agreement does not affect other county employees, whose pay and benefits are set through separate personnel processes.
Deputies covered under the new agreement began seeing the negotiated salary adjustments with the start of fiscal year 2027 on July 1.
