More money for Sheriff’s Department but fewer deputy positions part of ’24-25 budget plan
The top priority identified in the next biennial Pierce County budget is public safety, according to a draft of the 2024-2025 budget, which was presented by Executive Bruce Dammeier to the Pierce County Council last week.
Other priorities include transportation and congestion relief, homelessness, economic development and graffiti and litter removal.
The preliminary 2024-2025 budget is $3.2 billion, a 1.2% increase, or $38.5 million, over the 2022-2023 budget.
The proposed 2024-2025 general fund would make up about $890 million of the overall budget, and includes general government expenditures like supporting the County Council and other county departments, District and Superior Court operations, parks and recreation and the Sheriff’s Department, which includes corrections. Revenues for the general fund come from taxes, fines and permit revenue.
Public safety would account for 76% of the general-fund budget with $434.2 million. Legal and judicial services follow with $239.5 million. The Sheriff’s Department budget includes a 15% increase of $19.4 million more funding than the last biennial budget.
Despite an increase in funding, proposed staffing numbers for deputies and corrections officers would be lower than what was allocated in the 2022-2023 budget. Instead of adding more positions, the focus would be on filling existing jobs. The Sheriff’s Department has had challenges attracting and retaining patrol deputies and corrections officers to work at the county jail.
Sheriff Ed Troyer told The News Tribune the budget plans for his department “are fair and the right decision” as the county’s population continues to increase and there is more need for services but costs continue to rise.
The council will be hearing additional presentations from county departments and other elected officials in the coming weeks and months. A final budget is expected to be approved Nov. 21.
What guided Dammeier’s ‘24-25 budget proposal?
Four economic assumptions guided the development of the budget, said county council communications manager Bryan Dominique in a Monday budget update. Those include:
Rising interest rates, which will result in a period of slower economic growth in 2024, particularly in the building and construction sectors.
Reduced construction activity, a major driver of sales tax revenue in Pierce County, which will result in lower levels of sales tax collections, recording fees and other revenues sensitive to the real estate market.
Higher short-term interest rates on County investments will result in increased interest earnings revenue.
Moderate economic growth is expected to return in late 2024 and 2025, but at lower levels than the significant growth seen during 2020 through 2022.
What are some of the key investments identified?
According to the 2024-2025 Community Engagement Survey, 73% of surveyed Pierce County residents identified public safety and crime as their top priority for county government. Violence, homelessness, the high cost of living and drugs were identified as the biggest problems facing Pierce County.
Among some of the strategic investments in the budget plan to build “safe and just communities” include:
$6.7 million to continue 24 Prosecuting Attorney positions to address the court backlog and other legislative changes
$4.5 million for a new Community Restoration and Cleanup Initiative, with increased emphasis on cleaning up nuisance properties, encampments and drug houses
$3.0 million for the Small Business Safety and Security Grant Program
$2.7 million for hiring incentives for sheriff’s and corrections deputies
$1.1 million to establish a Conflict Office in the Department of Assigned Counsel
$975,000 to create a Civilian Review Board
Sheriff’s Department spending plan
The 2024-2025 budget would allocate a 15% increase in funding to the sheriff’s Corrections Department to offset increased costs within the jail, including compensation, overtime, food services and inmate medical and pharmaceutical costs, according to the preliminary budget.
The budget also would allocate a 10% increase, or $20.1 million, for policing the unincorporated areas of the county. Those operational costs include compensation and overtime for patrol deputies and detectives, fleet services and Humane Society contract increases.
The 2024-2025 budget proposes to have 188.5 full-time deputies on staff, down from 202.5 budgeted deputies in 2022-2023, and 248 corrections officers, down from about 260 budgeted officers in 2022-2023.
Nine vacant correction officers positions are being closed, and 12 vacant deputy positions are being closed, with an additional two vacant positions each converted to other job classifications, according to the preliminary budget.
Funding from reductions in staff would be reallocated to support increasing operational costs, according to the preliminary budget.
The focus over 2024-25 would be to fill existing vacancies in both corrections and patrol, county officials said.
According to the county Finance Department, the goal is to fill about 64 corrections officer vacancies and about 34 sheriff’s deputy vacancies in 2024-2025.
On Thursday, representatives from the Sheriff’s Department, the Superior Court and the Juvenile Court will present their budgets to the council committee of the whole and answer questions.
Among the projected expenditures in the corrections are a 24% increase in other services and charges (food and medicinal costs for inmates), 18% increase in administration costs, 15% increase in staff benefits, 14% increase in supplies, 11% increase in care and custody services and 11% increase in salaries, according to the preliminary budget.
The Sheriff’s Department expenditures include a 55% increase in special teams services, 21% increase in patrols, 18.5% increase in traffic services, 17% increase in animal control services, 17% increase in benefits, 16% increase in investigations and 15% increase in drug investigations, according to the proposed budget.
Sheriff Troyer discusses budget proposal
Troyer said the Sheriff’s Department has the lowest officer-to-civilian ratio among law enforcement agencies in the county and recent “anti-cop sentiment” has made it harder to get people to work as a deputy.
Much of the funding in the ‘24-25 plan would be used to recruit, hire and train deputies to fill existing vacancies, Troyer said. The department would also use additional funding to invest in technology to try to reduce auto thefts in the area.
With vacancies filled, Troyer said, residents could expect to see faster response times to emergency calls.
“You’re gonna see faster response times, more investigating to be done on the back end of crime,” Troyer said. “We’ll be able to go look for habitual criminals that are causing the majority of the problems. There’s a lot of things that improve greatly if that happened.”
Troyer said sometimes deputies can’t respond to routine night calls until the following day.
“Calls where people need assistance and help, life-threatening calls are priority,” he said. “We go to so many of those that a lot of routine calls are not documented until the following shift or the following day. Or, we’re making phone calls to get them documented or having people call in their own reports.”
Animal control costs have gone up, as have costs associated with mental health services, pharmaceuticals and feeding “800 people a day … sometimes more” in the jail, Troyer said.
“And we have gas [costs] for 300 patrol cars and people out there working. Those are all costs that with inflation and just the price of doing business have gone up dramatically,” he said. “And just for us to be able to sustain the same level, it’s a big increase.”
County exec, council chair weigh in
County Executive Bruce Dammeier said the county has been “very fiscally responsible” in managing the budget but said, “This is a time of belt tightening.”
With pandemic-era federal funding from the American Rescue Plan Act and the CARES Act going away soon, “we’ve got to get back to our regular county funding sources” despite costs going up, including at the Sheriff’s Department, Dammeier said. Some of the traditional county funding sources are property taxes and sales taxes.
“Public safety is, and crime is, by far [residents’] biggest concern,” he said. “I have talked about it in my states of the county [addresses]. I’ve talked about it in prior budget submissions. That continues to be the top county priority. We see and feel it every day.”
Dammeier said “actions by the Legislature and others” caused many law enforcement officers to leave Pierce County, the state and the profession in general. One of the recent Washington laws Dammeier said was the most “egregious” for law enforcement raised the threshold for pursuit of people in vehicles, as was a law that removed criminal penalties for drug possession before hard drugs were re-criminalized in March. National conversations about “defunding the police” have also led to more local law enforcement officers leaving the profession, Dammeier said.
“So we have had to change our compensation packages … [and] invest in hiring incentives, lateral-transfer incentives, all those kinds of things,” he said. “But we’re in a deep hole. So this is not something that gets fixed overnight. This is going to take prolonged effort to get back to our approved staffing levels and what we need to support the community.”
Among his other priorities regarding public safety is helping prosecutors deal with a backlog of cases from the pandemic, investing in programs that have shown to reduce youth violence, as well as solving cases related to human trafficking and missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Ryan Mello, chair of the Pierce County Council, told The News Tribune on Friday that he is reviewing the proposed budget.
“This council takes public safety very seriously. Based on what I can tell in my early read, I think this council is going to have a slightly different approach to getting at addressing public safety issues,” Mello said.
The council will be looking at public safety in a multi-faceted way, stressing crime prevention and the root causes of crime, an approach Mello said a “strong majority of the council” agrees with.
“I think this council is very interested in not just the ‘throw more cops on the streets, lock them up, throw away the key’ kind of strategy as it relates to public safety. This council is looking at the very complex issues that cause criminal behavior [and] rising crime, and making sure that we’re following the data,” Mello said. “We know that the big leading causes of crime are poverty and people’s instability, access to resources, mental health and substance use issues.”
This story was originally published October 4, 2023 at 5:15 AM.
