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.
Well Judy, investigating or as your socialist bosses call it harassing criminals is exactly what the LCSD is supposed to do. If you are in the country illegally you are a criminal. I thank God every day the democrats did not stay in power.
Did you consider the possibility that the sheriff requests a bigger overtime budget every year but the county commissioners deny it year after year. Then they act surprised when they have to appropriate more funds when they knew it was coming just like it comes every year? People like you are the first to cry for the police to respond but fail to understand how under staffed the sheriffs office is. Stop the political grand standing and offer a real solution.
Oh I was so riled up when I read this article that I had to comment. I wasn’t riled up over the overtime that was paid out but the audacity of the person writing this piece. You could clearly see where the political lines were without even having to get to the end of the article to see it.
Look, the LCSD does so much for all of us. For what they do, for their lives that they put on the line everyday, an OT of $1M doesn’t even sound like a significant amount to cover. You want to cry about this from our county protectors but it’s ok for our government to waste money on people and things that aren’t even USA based, required or needed. How about you throw a fit about that for a change?
Do you know how much money, time and effort was put in by LCSD to stop the burglaries that were going on in our small towns this year alone by people who don’t even live in our county? What about the insane number of high speed chases they had to deal with from people, once again not from Livingston County, because they thought we were easy targets cause we are a lot of “country land” and no one would notice or care? What about the countless hours that they were on their shifts when tornadoes hit, storms and more? Guarding roads, rescuing people, trying to keep us all safe during those storms? Have you ever stopped and listened to a scanner and hear the amount of runs these folks go on in a shift, and that’s without natural disasters and criminals on the loose doing multiple city/township run throughs? Have you stopped to think about the fact that LCSD and the Commissioners wants what’s best for us and our community and therefore whether it be criminals or illegals or whomever, they are working to keep us all safe and help us keep what is ours ours?
I lived in a Detroit suburb and lived in Ypsilanti Township, and let me tell you, the difference from them to our county is night and day. When I moved here to Livingston County five and a half years ago, I was relieved. The first thing I noticed was how much our LEOs care, how hard they work to protect our areas to keep them safe and quiet, not allowing them to become ridden with gang violence, high level criminal activities, gun violence, etc. We here in Livingston County should be proud of what Sheriff Mike and the LCSD has done and is continuing to do everyday to keep those unwanted activities out.
I say to you, take a step back, reevaluate, and be thankful we have such a wonderful county to live in. Go investigate things that are truly corrupt or mismanaging funds and report on that. In my humble opinion, our law enforcement shouldn’t be on the top of the list. If anything, they should be offered more.