Electric City Weblog

Sheriff’s Office Meeting

Due to my kid’s end of season sports banquet, I was a little late to Sheriff Castle’s public budget meeting. Then I made it for about an hour and twenty minutes of his meeting before I nearly conked out and had to go home for the night, since I hadn’t been yet. I think I got the gist of it.

A big part of the problem here is statutory. The Sheriff’s Office is technically a separate jurisdictional entity, an elected office unto itself, yet the Office relies on the County for funding of its operations. Assuming the Sheriff is acting in good faith (which I do assume) and the County Commission is acting in good faith (which I do), there is simply a structural division that separates some of the funding decision making from the other decision making. Sometimes, this causes trouble. We can call it a power struggle or whatever we want, but the fact is that the problem we face could easily occur with or without personality differences.

Another problem we face is that our Sheriff and our Commissioners use two very difficult styles to communicate.  Sheriff Castle tends to appeal on a very emotional level. He believes strongly in the value of what he does, as do I, and he relates the importance of his mission in human terms: a missing child, an escaped convict, a community catastrophe. Those were essentially the terms of the discussion tonight. Think: “How can I worry about money when I know that, on average, an abducted child is dead if not located within the first 24 minutes?”  Those are powerful, emotional arguments and tend to be the Sheriff’s choice.

The Commission, on the other hand, tends to be personified in this discussion by Commissioner Joe Briggs who talks in terms of definite, concrete financial realities. I don’t think Commissioner Briggs is indifferent to the emotional struggles involved in law enforcement, but as a fellow who has to ‘write the checks,’ he necessarily focuses on the more mundane seeming, yet important, aspects of the Sheriff’s Office’s funding.

Simply read the two gentlemen’s take on the issues here and you’ll see what I mean.

Depending on the predisposition of the audience, one style or the other will tend to be more persuasive in different contexts. Given our Sheriff’s style, the meeting tended much more toward emotional generalities than numerical specifics.

Now, to the meeting:  First, I believe the room was, for the most part, filled with supporters of Sheriff Castle. Many, if not most, of the questioners seemed to be known to Sheriff Castle, and many of the questions sounded to me like statements of support phrased, as Alec Trebek might say, in the form of a question. Most of these evoked room-wide murmors of approval, and mention of the Commission was often met with tones of derision. I don’t think Sheriff Castle changed many minds; I think most of these people agreed with him before the meeting started.

One of the points Sheriff Castle made repeatedly was that his office deals with unknowns. He cannot control the number of homicides, or the number of big trials, so, as he put it, he is “different from all the other departments” and he “cannot budget with the unknown.” While I am sympathetic to his position, especially in light of the statutory framework, this statement misses the mark. We all budget with the unknown. I don’t know how many new cases I will get next month, and I don’t know how much money I will have to spend for the next expert witness. We forecast, we guess, we do our best. Law enforcement is not immune to that.

Another point he made more than once is that budget constraints imposed on him by the County require him to seek inmates to fill beds (and generate revenue), and then these inmates are released into our community from parts far and wide. He stated that there are 1,200 parolees, 750 sexual or violent offenders, and 240 prerelease inmates in our community as a result of his efforts to fill beds to meet his budgetary requirements. Not directly stated, but clearly implied, was that these individuals would not be in our community but for the budgetary constraints imposed on  him by the County Commission. I do not know if that is true.

He repeatedly discussed a legislative recommendation of some kind to the effect that the Sheriff’s Office be funded at 37% (of what I do not know) and asserted that his Office is only funded at 17%. Many in the audience picked up on this as clearly indicative of the error of the County Commission. I have not been able to find the reference to the 37%, so if any of you know what it is, please help us out.

I asked “what to do?” In a statutory framework such as we have, with two parties of good faith, how do we solve the crisis? He said that he has tried to educate the County Commission, but he doesn’t know what to do “when they quit listening.”

He described a very high tech van for transporting inmates to and from the prison, complete with infrared, and cameras and bells and whistles. The pricetag? $250,000.00. The funding from the County? $20,000.00. He implied that the failure to equip his office with this van resulted in the prisoner escape in Helena a few years ago.

The Sheriff was asked whether he ever sat down with the Commission, face-to-face and raised these points. He started respond that he had sent them letters, but the questioner interrupted and said “no, I mean face-to-face.” The Sheriff responded that he had tried, but was unsuccessful. Why he was unsuccessful was not clearly stated.

There was one gentleman present, “Bob,” who was apparently involved or formerly involved in law enforcement. He was quite sure of himself, and somewhat monopolized the question and answer period. He was a strong supporter of the Sheriff, and pretty clearly held anyone who disagreed with him in scoffing disdain. Shortly before I left, he suggested that the Sheriff “oughtta have another one of these meetings, and make them Commissioners sit and listen” to what the Sheriff has to say. I agree with him, although I am significantly more prone to accept the reality that there are two sides to this story. Far from “them Commissioners” sitting and listening to the Sheriff, I would be interested in hearing what the two sides have to say in response to each other.

Many of these ‘points’ are interpretive, and it is easy to convince a friendly audience when the other side isn’t present to make the counterpoint. (I often tell clients how easy it would be to win my cases if it weren’t for that damn opposing party.) I found myself wondering on several occasions just what Commissioner Beltrone or Commissioner Briggs might have to say in response to the Sheriff’s suggestions.

Maybe we ought to organize a community forum on this issue. Not a debate, per se, since this is not a campaign. But something with some structure to allow everyone to make his or her point, and allow the other side to respond. Then we might be able to get to the bottom of this.

For now, though, I am left with the following. Our Sheriff means well, works hard, and believes in his job. If dirt were made of gold, I’d love nothing more than to give him a trillion dollars a day in funding. In a world of (very) limited resources, though, there is inevitably some push and some pull. Unfortunately, after tonight I only know that I would like the Sheriff to have what he wants. I do not know, however, whether it is reasonable or feasible to give it to him. These are the difficult decisions in governance.

Posted in Cascade County Government | 5 Comments »