The Livingston County Commission took its eye off the ball.
Instead of paying attention to county business and doing its real job of managing the county budget, the commission was busy passing resolutions on such things as harassing undocumented immigrants.
When the commissioners weren’t looking, Sheriff Mike Murphy ran up more than $1 million in overtime costs for the jail and patrol deputies. The expenses were so far off the $338,635 budgeted for overtime that the sheriff’s office needed an extra allocation of $661,634 to cover overtime just through the third quarter.
At its Oct. 28 meeting, the commission unanimously approved dipping into the county’s reserves for a supplemental appropriation for the sheriff’s budget to cover the expense. It spent a total of one minute and 40 seconds on rubberstamping the request and no one bothered to ask the sheriff a question about the spending.
The sheriff maintains that $1 million in overtime is cheaper than hiring more people and that overtime for deputies is hard to control because they can’t go off the clock if they are investigating an accident that happened near the end of their shift.
But some $494,000 of the overtime was related to staffing in the county jail. Why not investigate whether additional staff there would result in savings? Because the county commission is fixated on headcount. The commissioners hate to hire people. Instead, they let Murphy lowball staffing costs in his initial budget request and then run up big overtime bills later.
Next year, commissioners need to make sure the sheriff submits a realistic budget that reflects recent overtime costs so taxpayers aren’t surprised. And then they should demand quarterly reports from him to make sure he is attempting to control overtime costs.
But that hard work of controlling expenses isn’t nearly as much fun as scapegoating immigrants.
