Boone County Sheriff faces staff cuts, revenue shortage
- 6:18 pm
- January 23, 2019
BOONE COUNTY (WREX) – The Boone County Sheriff’s Office is facing a crisis. It says its running on bare bones and losing around half a million dollars in revenue this year.
“Quite frankly, I have to draw a line in the sand,” Sheriff Dave Ernest said. “We cannot go below our staffing levels right now. This is a bare minimum. We have cut to the max.”
For the past several years, the Boone County jail helped house DeKalb County inmates for annual fees of around $300,000 to $500,000. But now the DeKalb County jail is open and that revenue stream is gone. That means Boone County has to make up the difference.
“We lost another deputy this budget period, we lost another corrections officer this budget period which obviously doesn’t help our staffing levels,” Ernest said.
But board members say even those cuts might not be enough.
“It’s kind of a waiting game to understand what that new economic situation is for us,” Boone County Board Chairman Karl Johnson said.
For Johnson that means keeping a close eye on opportunities for new revenue — or *possibly making more cuts.
If we’re going to make reductions, we’d prefer to make those reductions at the corrections facility rather than deputies on the street,” Johnson said. “I think deputies on the street correlates directly to the potential safety of our citizens and keeping crime out of the area.”
Although with staff-levels low at both the sheriff’s office and the jail, the county is also juggling rising overtime costs.
“We had close to $350,000 dollars in overtime last year, which is ridiculous for a jail our size,” Ernest said.
With costs piling up and cash running out, Boone County needs a solution to this problem that only threatens to get worse.
The public safety budget makes up more than half of Boone County’s $17 million budget.
Above is from: https://wrex.com/category/2019/01/23/boone-county-sheriff-faces-staff-cuts-revenue-shortage/
