Kootenai County Sheriff Rocky Watson doesn’t have to read Joseph Heller’s tour de force to know what Catch-22 means.

In his case, it means hiring and training deputies and jailers and then watching helplessly as they leave for departments in Spokane County after four or five years for better pay and benefits. Who can blame good recruits who grasp the nuances of their tough jobs for opting to leave for $4 or $5 more per hour for the same work only 25 minutes away by freeway? Last year, Watson’s department lost $120,000 in training costs for deputies who left after the county had paid for their schooling.

Watson has a simple solution for his dilemma: The county can increase pay for his deputies and ranking officers by not underwriting nonessential services such as the county airport and fairgrounds and by using its full taxing authority to raise another $400,000 or so in revenue. “The answers are out there,” Watson told The Spokesman-Review this week, “but they’re not easy answers.”

Indeed, they aren’t. The sheriff’s solution doesn’t work on two levels – property owners appreciate the commissioners’ efforts to hold down governmental costs, and “nonessential” services have vocal constituencies that would protest. A better solution would be to approach the problem methodically, identifying where raises are needed and how much those raises should be to make them competitive with similar jobs in neighboring departments. Then, the county should commit to increasing the wages of targeted jobs over five years or so.

Twelve years ago, the county began to address the talent drain throughout the courthouse by funding a wage and benefit study. The sheriff’s office isn’t the only department losing trained talent and institutional knowledge. The goal then and now is to raise salaries and keep them within 80 percent of those paid in Spokane County, according to Commissioner Dick Panabaker. Unfortunately, tough economic times in the past forced smaller wage increases than desired and even salary freezes. As a result, the county fell further behind in wages and benefits.

Today, Kootenai County sheriff’s deputies are the lowest-paid officers in the region. But 911 dispatchers have bigger wage gaps and higher turnover than deputies.

Earlier this year, county commissioners ran into a firestorm of politically motivated protest when they flirted with the idea of funding a $60,000 wage and benefits study. Disingenuously, some partisan supporters of other candidates in Republican primary races against Panabaker and Commissioner Rick Currie seized on the issue to make the incumbents appear as though they were wasteful.

As a result of the controversy, the commissioners backed away from the proposed study and lost an opportunity to begin addressing the wage gulf. Corporations routinely fund wage and benefit studies to remain competitive. With a $57 million budget, Kootenai County could be considered a large corporation with an outsourcing problem. The problem is known. The details aren’t. Without a professional study, county officials will continue to fumble around trying to find simple solutions to a long-standing, complicated problem.