“Doing more with less” seems to be the municipal motto these days. That’s how the city spins the police recruitment and retention crisis. But nobody understands the meaning of the phrase better than the men and women who are trying to raise a family on a New York City police officer’s salary. While the cost of living continues to rise, PBA members have to make do with a paycheck from a contract that has expired for almost three years now. It’s painful.

It hurts even more when you get hit with an unexpected big-ticket expense like a car-repair bill or the failure of a major appliance. There’s nothing like living week-to-week and getting blind-sided by a financial emergency costing hundreds of dollars. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

We also know about doing more with less on a professional level. Today there are about 22,722 police officers in the N.Y.P.D., down from 27,305 in 1999. Despite what the city says, there are 4,583 fewer police officers on our streets today than six years ago. We know that to be an accurate figure because it’s from our headcount of dues-paying members.

Over the past five years, the PBA has been feeling the pinch too — with dues-paying membership shrinking while those extraordinary expenses keep mounting up. The city has forced us to fight a war for every right and benefit our members get. Those wars are expensive to wage. That’s why the PBA delegate body voted overwhelmingly April 12 to approve a membership dues increase to enhance the union’s ability to fight for our member’s futures.

Just look back at the years of court battles the PBA had to fight to win the right to argue our wage and contract disputes before the state PERB instead of the city’s Office of Collective Bargaining (talk about your stacked deck). It cost millions to win that right. It was, without a doubt, money well spent, but it was expensive.

Now we’re near the end of our second PERB arbitration, another costly war to win us a fair contract. In the last round, the PERB decision awarded our members a contract that the city calculated was worth $50 million more than the uniformed coalition’s package. We certainly won far more than we spent, but we still spent a lot. Today, as we near the end of the latest round of binding arbitration, we’re facing another extraordinarily high bill.

And that’s not to mention the legal bills to defend our members in high-profile cases, the cost of staging protests at the Republican National Convention, the media ad campaigns in support of a fair raise — all cost valuable member’s dues money. Wars, in labor or the military, cost money.

But we’ll spare no expense when it comes to serving our members and getting them the best possible deal.