The Lane County Sheriff’s Office did not spend the full amount of its budgeted revenue for the 2006-2007 fiscal year, and also received additional revenue from housing federal prisoners.
The result? Now the office has an excess of $800,000. However, a large majority of the money has already been spoken for as of last week.
In a 4-1 vote last Wednesday, the county’s Board of Commissioners approved a plan by the sheriff’s office to use $500,000 of the surplus money for two projects.
A little less than half of the allotted funds will be spent on a Radio Network Program, and the remaining 58 percent of the half-million – $290,000 – will be used to increase reserve funding for purchasing vehicles for sheriff’s deputies, a project the department had recently fallen behind on.
“We turned around and requested the $500,000 from the Board of Commissioners for a sinking fund,” which can also be called a replacement fund, said Sgt. Clint Riley, a spokesman for the Lane County Sheriff’s Office. That way, in the future when a new vehicle needs to be purchased for the fleet, there will be money in the reserve, and “we don’t have to scrap for the funding,” he added.
A past county auditor recommended that the reserve fund should be at a level in excess of $1 million, but a new county auditor is developing a revised recommendation. However, Riley said, “we’re not at the level we need to be, but adding (the $290,000) helps to get us closer to be where we need to be.”
The radio program brings in new, up-to-date digital technology for the sheriff’s office, replacing the older analog systems currently being used. The digital systems will allow the corrections officers and deputies of the sheriff’s office the ability to communicate with other law enforcement agencies in the area.
“We need to keep up with the technology … and without radio upgrades, we couldn’t do our jobs effectively,” Riley said.
While the potential loss of millions of dollars in federal timber funds earlier this year had many county employees worried where new revenue would come from, the federal funds were restored when Congress granted a one-year extension. But that money is currently set to expire again next year. This year’s excess money resulted from additional revenue to the sheriff’s office, not a pre-emptive cut to their budget.
“There’s what we call a lapse where departments rarely spend all of their budgets … and there is a rule in Lane County that departments can only spend 98 percent of their budget each year,” County Administrator Bill Van Vactor said. “The Sheriff’s Department just had an additional savings of $800,000” that came from the added revenue of U.S. Marshals increasing the number of beds they use in the Sheriff’s correctional facilities after the budget was adopted, Van Vactor added.
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