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Sheriff pares staffing request, presses school board over funding for SROs as taser and body‑camera costs strain budgets
Summary
Sheriff Billy Woods reduced his original staffing ask and removed several capital items from his FY2025–26 request. Commissioners and the sheriff debated how school resource officers are funded and flagged rising costs for body-worn cameras and taser contracts that could be treated as capital to free up sales-tax funding.
Sheriff Billy Woods told the Board he trimmed his original FY2025–26 staffing and capital requests but warned that the county remains short-staffed relative to a recent staffing study. Woods said he reduced an initial request for 25 new sworn deputies and a few community-service positions to a revised request for 12 sworn deputies and 10 community-service specialists, and removed a number of one‑time capital items, including a $3.0 million vehicle purchase line.
“Currently, the experts made it abundantly clear that we sit 108 deputies short,” Woods said, noting a five‑ and ten‑year projection that showed substantially higher needs as Marion County grows. The sheriff told the board the county’s vehicle-replacement needs for his fleet run roughly $6 million–$8 million a year…
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