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Sheriff's office reports roughly $1.5M under budget, seeks savings for software; commissioners debate overtime line item
Summary
At a July 6 Weber County Commission work session, sheriff's office representative Julie Stoddard told commissioners the office is trending well under budget (about $1.5 million under on wages and benefits) and proposed using savings for a software purchase; commissioners debated whether to restore an overtime line item for transparency.
Julie Stoddard, speaking for the sheriff's office at the Weber County Commission work session on July 6, said the office is trending under budget and proposed using departmental savings to buy new software she called a "game changer." Stoddard told commissioners the office had initially targeted roughly $400,000 in savings and that, as reported in the session, the department is about "1,000,000 and a half under on wages and benefits" across its divisions.
Stoddard said chiefs have been tightly controlling overtime while vacancies and laterals have affected pay scales. "We've brought over some laterals, but they just haven't been as high on the scale as the ones who left," she said, describing challenges recruiting tenured deputies. A commissioner asked whether Marshall/ICE activity was affecting workload; Stoddard said the office is "on par with Marshalls" but noted an "explosion" in activity since October when ICE was incorporated into related contract work.
The conversation also covered a draft agreement with the school district for school resource officers. Stoddard said a "preliminary" $17,000 figure from the school district had been drafted by the district and "should be before you" in the coming week for routing through the county contract system.
Commissioners pressed for clearer year-end projections. Stoddard said the department expects to end the year below budget, in part because many positions went unfilled earlier in the year and attrition produced savings. Several commissioners recommended Stoddard provide the commission a concise projection to bring to the formal budget hearing so the commission could set realistic budgeted numbers.
A policy debate followed about how to show overtime in the budget. Some commissioners urged restoring a separate overtime line item and offsetting it with attrition savings for transparency and management oversight, so department leaders could more easily track spending. Stoddard said she already maintains a separate spreadsheet tracking overtime hours and dollars and that the information exists for oversight.
What happens next: Stoddard said the draft school-district contract will be routed through the county contract system and is expected to appear before the commission soon; commissioners asked staff to include the projections in their formal budget presentation. No formal budget vote or change was made at the work session.
Sources and provenance: The account above is drawn from the sheriff's office update at the July 6 work session (presentation and question-and-answer with Julie Stoddard and commissioners).
