Cowlitz County finance staff flag overtime, staffing and coding issues in juvenile detention 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 open positions in the county payroll system and that some overtime may be the result of incorrect coding or improperly completed time cards. "We actually may owe them overtime money," she said in summary of the sampling work finance staff performed.

Mike Schultz, juvenile detention manager, described how vacancies in lead-officer posts drive overtime costs. He said the county added lead positions last year so that employees formally designated as leads would reduce the hours filled by overtime. Temporary out-of-class pay and the need to backfill posts used for training have continued to push overtime upward, Schultz said. "All of our overtime usage is related to those open officer positions," he said.

Schultz said training new hires is intensive—about 200 hours—and that staff who train recruits often must be backfilled with overtime. He said the department has recently filled several posts and expects to see the overtime trend decline: "May was supposed to be my month where we're starting to see the benefits of hiring our new staff… and our numbers are reflecting that so far this month."

Commissioners and staff discussed occupancy and staffing ratios. Schultz said the facility has beds for roughly 70 youth but is not staffed at that level; two staffed pods can safely hold about 32–36 youths. Over the preceding year the detention center’s average daily population rose from about 7.?. to 10.2 for 2024, with a high of 23 and a low of four or five, he said.

Schultz also flagged a recent surge in admissions tied to a complex case that required opening a third housing pod to keep certain juveniles separated for safety and case reasons; he said that also increases overtime because the center is staffed for two pods. "We can't house some of them together… so we've had to open up a third pod," Schultz said.

Probation finances were reported separately by Funk Baxter. She said juvenile probation receives substantial intergovernmental funding—largely state grants including BECCA funding—and that probation revenues and expenses are generally tracking to plan, though some lines are ahead of target because of timing of internal service billings.

The board directed staff to return in three months with a follow-up financial report. Funk Baxter recommended developing a time-sheet training package for detention staff to address the coding and overtime questions uncovered in the sample review.