Budget Busters – The Sheriff’s Sequel

Budget Busters – The Sheriff is at the Trough

At the Financial Management Committee meeting, we predicted that the approval of the Court Clerk budget busting request would lead to even worse budget manipulations.
Tonight, the Sheriff is requesting a budget increase that totals nearly $339,000 and will add six additional full time employees to the County payroll.
Supposedly, these funds are needed to implement a DUI litter pick up program and Court Security.
These requests should not even be in front of the Commission, because no written information on either proposal was presented to the Financial Management Committee, or made available to the public. This is the page from the Financial Management Committee information on this subject. It reads: “No Documentation Available by Deadline”.
More important, an analysis of the Sheriff’s DUI proposal reveals that the numbers do not make a shred of sense.

The Sheriff’s own statistics say that he makes about 270 DUI arrests per year
Allowing for people found innocent and those not eligible, about 200 people might be candidates for the litter pick up program.
The law requires each convict to be sentenced to be 24 hours of litter pick-up.
The law also requires that a DUI litter detail consists of an attendant and five convicts
This will result in the need for 960 hours of a Sheriff’s attendant time.
The Sheriff’s proposal requests enough money to cover four full time deputies – approximately 8000 hours of manpower.
Why is the Sheriff requesting a budget for 8000 hours of manpower to cover a need of only 960 hours?
On top of all this, the Sheriff’s is requesting more than $27,000 worth of gas to support this activity. This is enough fuel to cover 100,000 miles in one of the Sheriff’s inefficient SUVs. If you go through the math, this says that our DUI convicts will be picking up litter at a speed of 101 miles per hour – a truly remarkable achievement!

In short the numbers presented in the Sheriff’s proposals make no sense.
They should be voted down by this Committee.
In the future the Sheriff should be required to present detailed information to the Financial Management Committee just like all the other County departments.