County commissioners, can you spare $400,000?
Sheriff wants funds to hire five deputies
Flathead County Sheriff Mike Meehan wants to hire five extra deputies, and he asked the county commissioners Monday for the roughly $400,000 to do so.
The county commissioners said they would discuss the request during a budget workshop. But they added they must consider the county's overall budget picture as well.
"We want to work together to solve this problem," Commissioner Dale Lauman said.
However, an unanswered question is whether new taxes might be levied or whether the sheriff's request would be funded from other current county revenues.
Meehan and Undersheriff Pete Wingert - with about 25 deputies standing in back of the room - told the commissioners that the Flathead County Sheriff's Office is understaffed in proportion to the population and the area it covers.
The Flathead office has 47 sworn officers, of whom 30 are road deputies with two more slots just being filled, two slots filled by injured officers and one slot held by a deputy going to Iraq. The rest of the sworn deputies are detectives or administrative officers.
Meehan and Wingert said:
. Flathead County has 5,253 squares miles and roughly 55,000 people living outside of incorporated cities with police forces. That translates to one deputy per 1,202 rural people.
. The national sheriff's office average is one deputy per 770 people.
. Cascade County's 2,708 square miles has 23,000 people living in unincorporated areas with 35 deputies. That translates to one deputy per 658 rural people.
. Gallatin County has 2,631 square miles and almost 36,000 people in unincorporated areas with 50 deputies. That translates to one deputy per 716 people.
. On average, each Flathead County deputy handled 412 calls in 1999 and 826 calls in 2006.
If the Flathead County Sheriff's Office gets five extra deputies and the rural county's population grows by a predicted 6,573 people - based on 2,054 requests for new homes in 2007 - the county will be able to field one deputy for every 1,213 people, Wingert said.
Right now, the Sheriff's Office requires a minimum of four road deputies on duty at a time. Hiring five new deputies will add one officer per shift.
"Even with five new deputies today …. we'd still be behind [when new homes and families are added]," Meehan said.
The current staffing problem is eating into overtime budgets and causing problems with piling up unused compensation times, Meehan said. And it is forcing deputies to merely react to calls, rather than taking active measures against crime, he said.
Meehan - whose office's annual budget is about $5.9 million - said five new deputies would cost about $400,000 annually. He hopes to get the commissioners to approved money for the new deputies for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins July 1.
However, Meehan does not want to go to the taxpayers for the extra $400,000.
He wants the commissioners to reroute revenue to his office, arguing that public safety should be a higher priority than some other county functions.
Meehan said he has a proposal on how to tackle that matter, but declined to elaborate publicly until he sits down with the commissioners in a budget workshop.