The Franklin Police Department will be getting three new cruisers in the near future.

City Council recently approved the purchase of three 2013 Dodge Chargers at a cost of $23,044 each. With the installation of equipment — including new in-car cameras and new radios — the total cost is $108,867 for the vehicles.

Normally, only two vehicles get replaced each year, according to Chief Russ Whitman, but an accident in February this year totaled another cruiser. An officer was responding to an emergency call on the west side of Franklin with his lights and sirens activated when he was struck at the intersection of Second and River streets in front of the Lion’s Bridge. The impact spun the cruiser around and into a third vehicle, according to Whitman.

The city received an insurance payment of $14,483.33 from Ohio Casualty Insurance Company that will go toward one of the replacement vehicles. The other two will be replaced with $67,000 that was budgeted for this year. An additional $27,184 will come from the city’s general fund for the vehicle purchases.

“We are getting these 2013 vehicles at 2012 state bid prices because we ordered them in August,” Whitman said.

Currently, the department has 27 marked and unmarked cars in its fleet. Whitman said he plans to hire a new officer in the next few weeks, which will bring the department back to a full staff of 25 officers for the first time since 2006.

“We promised our residents when they passed an income tax increase last year that we would bring the quality of our service back to where we were and that is what we are doing,” said Whitman, adding that a new dispatcher will also be hired soon for a total of seven dispatchers on staff.

The police department also is replacing two city-owned detective vehicles at no cost to taxpayers.

The cost of the detective vehicles is $23,000, for which the funding is coming from more than $10,000 cash that has been forfeited from drug dealers through the courts, as well as through the sale of two vehicles that were seized from a drug dealer and a habitual OVI offender for approximately $9,000. There were also four other vehicles from the city impound lot that were sold for more than $4,000.