Sheriff Knezovich seeks funding for drug task force

Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich again is asking for more money next year, warning that without additional funds the county may lose its ability to investigate high-level drug trafficking.

“You’ve heard me talk about this since 2009,” Knezovich told county commissioners Monday morning. “We’ve pulled every rabbit out of the hat. There’s no more rabbits.”

Knezovich said about 30 staff positions have been cut since the height of the recession, reducing patrols to skeleton crews and drastically constricting the office’s ability to investigate property crimes. He once again asked commissioners to place a property tax increase on the ballot, a step they seemed unwilling to take without first learning how much deputies will be owed in back pay through contract arbitration that took place last week. Commissioners also said they are uncertain a tax increase would solve the staffing concerns Knezovich presented.

“Even if we took the annual 1 percent bump in property taxes, that adds about another $450,000 to our annual revenue stream,” Commissioner Todd Mielke said. “Today, we’ve been talking about, roughly, between overtime and the positions, about $1.5 million to $1.6 million.”

But Knezovich is pitching a 0.2 percent increase in the sales tax, not the property tax, to fund public safety needs, a measure he says could generate up to $9 million for the office.

If the county does not find more money in its coffers, Knezovich said, the Spokane Regional Drug Task Force would be at risk. The investigative agency, one of 19 of its kind across the state, federally deputizes members of local law enforcement to target “mid- to upper-level” criminal organizations engaged in the sale of illicit drugs and gang activity.

In the belt-tightening that has occurred since 2008, the county has shed its ability to investigate drug and gang activity on its own, Knezovich said, and instead put all its resources into the task force, which is funded by a combination of local, state and federal money.

Task forces like the Spokane team have been funded by federal grants since 1988. They target so-called “high intensity drug trafficking areas” designated by the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Spokane task force members have two recent, massive drug busts to their credit, including the breakup of an oxycodone ring in March 2013 operating out of Los Angeles and a similar operation earlier this year that targeted traffickers in Washington, Idaho, California and Nevada. Both of those cases resulted in dozens of indictments and several convictions, including guilty verdicts in a three-week federal jury trial that concluded last week.

The task forces are able to generate money through seizures in the busts. Lt. John Nowles of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office said the seizures have amounted to about $240,000 each year, much less than is required to keep the task force running. Revenue from the large seizures of property in the two major drug busts, what Nowles called the largest in Eastern Washington’s history, have not yet started trickling in, he said.

“Sometimes it might take years before we see those,” Nowles said.

Nowles said the Sheriff’s Office would be making similar pitches to other cities in the county, including Spokane Valley and Airway Heights, to bump up their support of the task force in the coming weeks. Nowles also said the Spokane Police Department decided to internalize its mid- to upper-level drug investigations recently, stripping the task force of two of its officers.

If additional funding is not received, the task force will run out of money “sometime before the end of 2015,” Nowles said.

Commissioners have been wary of discussing any new hiring or pay increases until an arbitrator rules how much sheriff’s deputies are owed in back pay after three years without a new contract. An arbitrator met with representatives of the Deputy Sheriffs Association and county labor relations staff last week and will rule sometime in the coming months how much the county owes deputies. Estimates from commissioners place costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million to $4 million.

“We’ve unfortunately been backed into a point where an arbitrator will decide if Spokane County invests in bodies, or pays benefits for a subgroup of the roughly 1,900 county employees,” Mielke said. “That makes it very difficult for us to determine what we’re going to do in 2015.”

Commissioner Al French said he was reluctant to make long-term funding decisions without first seeing how the Legislature handles a high court decision mandating more funding for education.

“I have absolutely zero confidence that they will fund that without taking additional revenue from the county,” French said.

Knezovich once again suggested a sales tax increase to ease the budget issues and volunteered to campaign on its behalf.

“Let me do the lifting,” the sheriff said. “The only thing I ask is that you don’t go out and campaign against it.”

Commissioners took no action on Knezovich’s request Monday.