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| Sheriff's office, departments cutting to do |
| By Barbara LaBoe |
| Published: 04/14/2009 |
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Eighteen county departments have until Wednesday to cut $1.14 million more dollars to balance the 2009 Cowlitz County budget. Sheriff Bill Mahoney said he doesn’t know where he’s going to find the remaining $400,000 he needs to cut, adding it’s going to make it difficult to police the county the way residents have come to expect. “It’s a good day to be a drug dealer or a crook, that’s for sure,” Mahoney said after a Monday meeting with commissioners, elected officials and department heads. “They’ve got to be loving this.” Mahoney said he’s argued his case but “ the commissioners get to make those decisions. All of those people that say there’s fluff in government, now’s a great time to step up and show us where it is.” The cuts will hurt, but county officials said they would have been even worse without motor pool and technology reductions that trimmed $1.13 million from the budget. “It’s rough,” said Commissioner George Raiter of cutting $4.5 million to balance the 2009 budget. “But we have to get there.” Wednesday, department heads and elected officials are supposed to tell commissioners how they’ll make the remaining cuts. If they don’t, commissioners will make the decisions for them — including layoffs — Commissioner George Raiter said after Monday’s meeting. Employees losing their jobs will be told by April 21. Raiter said he knows not all the elected officials or department heads were happy with the commissioners’s numbers, but he repeated the budget must be balanced. The Sheriff’s office is the department with the most money left to cut at $400,000. Combined with the $93,000 in trims Mahoney already identified, his department’s $5.6 million budget will be reduced by $560,000. In addition, Mahoney’s contribution to the county motor pool is being reduced $379,895 which makes it more difficult to operate all of the patrol cars and other vehicles, he said. The office previously trimmed $200,000 in December, and Mahoney said Monday there’s no more fat left to cut. “It’s pretty brutal, there’s just no nice word for it,” Mahoney said. “We passed brutal two months ago.” In addition, the Superior Courts must cut $278,600 from the court, family court and juvenile detention and probation divisions. And the corrections department — including the jail, probation and offender services — must cut $176,000. Some departments aren’t facing any more cuts because they met the 10 percent goal commissioners asked for last month. Others have remaining cuts ranging from $37,000 to $1,000. All departments facing cuts failed to reach the commissioners’s goal of a 10 percent reduction on their own. Read more. If link has expired, check the website of the article's original news source. |
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