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Cowlitz County finance staff flag overtime, staffing and coding issues in juvenile detention review
Summary
Finance staff and detention managers told county commissioners that juvenile detention overtime has risen, staffing vacancies remain and time-sheet coding errors may be inflating overtime costs; commissioners asked for a three-month follow-up review.
Cowlitz County finance staff and juvenile detention managers told the Board of County Commissioners on Monday that the juvenile detention fund is showing higher-than-expected overtime even as overall personnel spending remains below budget and vacancies persist.
Finance Director Kathy Funk Baxter told commissioners the overtime for the first four months of the year rose to $129,006.47 compared with $103,231 for the same period last year. "We noticed that their overtime budget, their overtime expenses are higher than their budget," she said, and recommended additional review and targeted time-sheet training.
The county’s juvenile detention personnel budget for the year is $2,810,965; actual payroll through April was $854,004.68, Funk Baxter said. She also reported that detention shows 3.75…
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