Stevens County Faces Tightened Belt Officials Forced To Go Back On Promises, Raise Taxes To Keep Services Going

Stevens County officials hope residents will call state legislators with any complaints they have about county services that are about to be chopped.

Among other painful cuts necessary to balance this year’s budget, the Sheriff’s Department is scheduled to lose four officers at the end of the month.

Sheriff Craig Thayer said the loss of two road deputies, a captain and a jailer will have “a devastating effect on meeting basic public safety needs.” With calls for service and jail bookings at a record high, he thought he needed four more officers - not four fewer.

Including the sheriff, the department has 28 commissioned officers and two secretaries.

One sheriff’s deputy will be spared if the others agree to a request that they give up previously negotiated 5 percent raises. Another was spared when Capt. Duane Gagnon volunteered for a layoff.

“If my going means one of these younger guys with a family can stay, I’m all for it,” Gagnon said. “I’ve got 40 years in.”

Thayer is appealing to county commissioners to make fewer cuts in his department, but he joins commissioners and other county officials in laying much of the blame at the Legislature’s doorstep.

While the state sits on a surplus of approximately $900 million, the Legislature continues to hand counties costly new duties, such as enhanced 911 emergency dispatching and a school truancy crackdown under the Becca Bill.

Commissioners say their state legislative delegation and Senate Ways and Means Chairman Jim West, R-Spokane, have offered them sympathy but little cause for optimism.

Although the Sheriff’s Department is to suffer four of 11 planned layoffs, Auditor Tim Gray said the sheriff was spared any layoffs last year when 11 positions were eliminated in other departments. Commissioners also emptied their reserve fund to balance last year’s budget.

Other layoffs tentatively planned this year include the equivalent of almost two full-time positions in the auditor’s office, two in the District Court clerk’s office, 1-1/2 in the assessor’s office, one deputy Superior Court clerk and an attorney in the prosecutor’s office.

Gray said the cuts will reduce general fund staff to 1990 levels, when the county’s population was almost 21 percent smaller. He said this year’s county revenues will be about the same as last year’s, although “pass-through” bond payments from other counties in the Martin Hall juvenile detention center make the budget look about $472,000 larger.

Ten more layoffs would have been necessary this year if commissioners hadn’t swallowed their campaign promises and implemented two tax increases. The additional cuts could have caused a downward spiral by crippling the county’s ability to collect taxes, court fines and other revenue, Gray said.

Commissioners J.D. Anderson and Fred Lotze campaigned on a no tax-increase plank, but they joined Commissioner Fran Bessermin in implementing a 0.25-percent excise tax increase on real estate sales, and an increase in the sales tax from 7.5 percent to 7.6 percent.

“None of us are happy about it,” said Bessermin, who avoided the campaign promises that have come back to haunt Lotze and Anderson. “We just didn’t think we could cut any more.”

The tax increases, projected to raise $318,000, were particularly painful to Anderson. He is the most conservative of the three Republican commissioners, and the constituents who elected him are among the most conservative in the county.

“It’s the first time I’ve gone against my word, and it’s come back to haunt me because it’s made a lot of people mad,” Anderson said. “But I just didn’t feel it would be fair for me to play political possum and let the other two take the flak.”

He and the other commissioners say they’ll take a look at Thayer’s proposal to sell surplus county land and timber, but the serious money is in Olympia. They plan to buttonhole as many legislators as they can next week when they take their case to capital.

, DataTimes