PROVIDENCE — Amid calls from some City Council members for better oversight of Police Department spending, the council has ordered its internal auditor to look into an emergency purchase of uniforms for high-ranking officers and is considering cutting about $100,000 from the department’s current-year budget as a result of pay raises recently granted by Mayor David N. Cicilline.

With the city facing its most challenging mid-year deficit in recent memory, council members say that the focus on the department’s spending is representative of what should be expected by all the city’s departments in the coming months.

“This has been a long time coming,” said Councilman John J. Lombardi, whose request for the review of the uniform purchases was approved by the council at its Thursday meeting. “Every department needs to reduce spending. These are the things that we need to be talking about. If everything is supposed to be on the table for the governor and the legislature, then everything should be on the table for the city.”

The Police Department, which is allotted $45.7 million of the city’s current $641-million operating budget, has had a free rein for too long and the situation has been exacerbated by an administration that has not been forceful enough to intervene, council members contend.

“There is no oversight of that department. There are no proper checks and balances,” said council Finance Committee Chairman John J. Igliozzi. “There is a heightened sense of financial urgency out there with all that is going around, but we’re not necessarily getting that from the other branches of government.”

The mayor’s chief of administration, Richard I. Kerbel, declined to comment on the council’s specific actions and the opinions of council members on the management of the Police Department.

The department “has accomplished many things for this city,” Kerbel said. “While other cities are seeing an increase in crime, we are not, so I think the value of the Police Department is known to all city residents.”

He said that the administration’s priority was developing the city’s response to the governor’s proposed cuts in local aid, which amount to at least $14 million for Providence. “We need to focus on the issues presented to us now,” he said.

Lombardi said he was informed by a low-ranking police officer, whom he declined to identify, that the department made an emergency purchase of about $22,000 in “winter uniforms” in September that ultimately went to the department’s command staff.

An emergency purchase is exempt from the required open bidding process that all purchases over $5,000 are required to conduct under city ordinance.

“My question is what’s the emergency in buying winter clothes in September?” Lombardi said. “And why does the upper echelon of this department get these uniforms and not the rank and file?”

Internal auditor James Lombardi III (no relation to the councilman), who is appointed by the council to perform regular checks of departmental spending, says that he has yet to gather any information on the matter and declined to comment until an investigation was complete.

Meanwhile, the council Finance Committee endorsed reducing the current-year police budget.

Igliozzi, the chairman, said that move was in response to Cicilline’s decision to grant retroactive pay raises to five current and retired officers of the police command staff in November that amounted to nearly $85,000.

The committee also approved an amendment to the current- year budget ordinance that specifically prohibits the mayor from issuing retroactive pay raises to city employees except through binding arbitration or under court order. The budget amendments must be approved by the full council later this month.

Igliozzi said the council will next retain legal counsel to look into what options it has to recover the money that was paid out to the police officers.

According to Kerbel, the retroactive pay for the nonunion officers matches retroactive pay awarded to police union members in arbitration in the last fiscal year; however, the council says that action ignores a prior directive not to approve any retroactive pay raises for nonunion officials. “Hopefully those officers will voluntarily return that money to the city until this matter is resolved,” Igliozzi said.

Another police spending issue that council members are concerned about is the department’s overtime budget, which is budgeted this year at about $1.25 million.

Last fiscal year, council members contend, the department overspent the budget by nearly $1 million, and they fear it’s on track to do the same this year.

Kerbel on Friday disputed the council’s assertions, but could not provide a rough estimate of how the department’s overtime budget ended last year or whether it was on track to meet its budget this year until a careful review could be completed.

“Overtime is always higher in the first half of the year than in the latter half,” Kerbel said. “It’ll come closer in line by the end of the year.”

Said Lombardi, upon hearing Kerbel’s response: “He’s living in a bubble.”

pmarcelo@projo.com