It all came about at the meeting on the jail vote. After the vote failed, commissioner Bill Satterfield asked the sheriff if he needed more help in the jail. Of course the sheriff said he did. When asked how many more jailers he might need, he stated two or maybe one.

At Monday's budget meeting the sheriff asked the budget committee for 9 additional employees. When the question of just needing one or two, the sheriff said he meant one or two per shift. even though 2 x 3 shifts would be 6 new employees, Guider asked for nine. When all was said and done, Guider agreed to 4 total new employees. The additional cost for those four new employees could be as much as $235,570.00, depending on the insurance package they might choose.

We just passed the new 2016-2017 budget in July. The budget included the the sheriff's funding request for the jail. That request was fully funded which included 27 full time employees for the jail at a cost of about 1.2 million dollars.  

Here's the problem for the sheriff's new request. If he really needed more help in the jail, why wasn't that in his jail budget request for 2016-2017? The inmate population at the jail hasn't changed that much in the last several months, in fact, it's actually gone down some.

To be fair, Commissioner Satterfield did make the offer and I guess you can't blame the sheriff for taking him up it.

The requested increase will be on the commission's agenda to be voted on at their October 3rd meeting.