County weighs grant for adding 11 deputies
Three years covered, but costs kick in after that
Spokane County commissioners balked Tuesday at applying for a federal grant that would provide 11 officers for three years and then a big bill.
The grant would provide $2.9 million to cover salaries for three years, but the county would be required to retain the deputies for a fourth year.
County Grants Administrator Jennifer Stapleton said the fourth-year cost would be more than $1.2 million. That includes a $900-per-deputy uniform allowance that would have to be paid every year.
The grant doesn’t cover vehicles, equipment or training. It also doesn’t allow deductions for administrative services that Stapleton said would cost the county about $314,000 under a cost-recovery formula adopted last year.
Former county treasurer Skip Chilberg, now the sheriff’s business manager, said he doesn’t believe the county’s indirect costs would be that great. Regardless of that cost, commissioners and Chief Executive Officer Marshall Farnell questioned whether the county can afford the grant.
“Year four will be here before you know it,” Farnell said.
Chairman Al French noted that the $1.2 million cost roughly equals the annual sales-tax loss the county expects when Spokane annexes about 10 square miles of the West Plains next year.
“I don’t doubt that we could use more officers, but we have had to wrangle with paying the piper on some of the grants that have come due during my term,” Commissioner Mark Richard said.
Richard also took exception to Chilberg’s assertion that Spokane County has less than one deputy per 1,000 residents while “most of the counties in this state and others have at least 1 ½ to two.”
Such comparisons “can get skewed and become very murky very quick” because of different methodologies, Richard said. “When we say we are not as safe as other communities, I think we need to be darn sure of those numbers.”
A 2008 study by consultants, using 2007 data, showed the Spokane County sheriff’s staffing ratio superior to levels in Clark, Kitsap, Pierce, Snohomish, Thurston, Whatcom and Yakima counties.
French and Richard directed Chilberg to come back next week, when absent Commissioner Todd Mielke would be present. French said he wanted to hear how the sheriff’s office might offset some of the fourth-year cost of the grant.
Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said in an interview that he plans to address the commissioners next week, but his options for offsetting the costs are limited. He hopes a recovering economy will come to the rescue.
Otherwise, Knezovich said, “the best I can do is to try to control the overtime.”
He said overtime has “bloomed” because he doesn’t have enough officers to cover major incidents.
Knezovich said the $1.2 million fourth-year cost is roughly the amount his budget was cut last year.
“This (grant) is to get us about halfway back to where we were,” he said, noting his staffing is down 19 from a “high-water mark” of 244.
Commissioners have until May 23 to decide whether to seek the grant. Applications to the Department of Justice program have been unsuccessful in the past two years.