Kane Co. sheriff bailout plan approved
Kane County sheriff's deputies worried for weeks they would never see their final paychecks of the 2009 budget year. Those officers learned definitely Tuesday that they will be paid.
But their bosses will pay with smaller paychecks after a Kane County Board vote with a clear message on who's to blame for the department's budget shortfall.
The board's plan strips the sheriff's 26-person command staff of their pay for the final four days of the year via furloughs. Sheriff Pat Perez will still receive a paycheck by state law.
A total of about $106,000 in bills in the sheriff's office, ranging from car parts for squad cars to socks for inmates at the jail, will also go unpaid in the county board's plan. Those 2009 expenses will get shifted to the sheriff's 2010 budget, a move elected officials recognized as legal but a big no-no in accounting practices.
The cuts to salaries and expenses cut the total need for funds from about $1.2 million down to about $996,000. The county will fill that gap with its 2009 contingency funds. That leaves only about $55,000 in the contingency, making it very possible that the county finishes in the red just as it did in 2008.
County Board Chairman Karen McConnaughay said 2009 will go down as a year when a young county board learned how to make tough decisions and the consequences of delaying crucial action when it comes to money.
That goes double for Perez's command staff, who will take home a little less money for the holidays.
"There was a message in there," McConnaughay said of the bailout plan. "These are the folks who needed to come up with a solution at the eleventh hour. And those are the people who got furloughed."
Perez spent much of the meeting making promises to the county board that he will come in on budget in 2010, even though he'll start the year in the hole thanks to the shifting of $106,000 of 2009 debt into his 2010 budget. Perez even pledged that he'd pull the trigger on layoffs if push came to shove.
Perez said the furloughs his command staff will see to close out 2009 are the lesser of the potential evils and a signal in ongoing negotiations with union patrol officers that management is already shouldering its fair share of the burden to reduce costs.
"There's probably not some happy people, but in the end I'm sure they'd rather have a partial paycheck than no paycheck," Perez said of the bailout plan.
As far as his plan to cut in 2010, Perez said there will be no raises for nonunion employees and management will match whatever cuts union employees agree to take via negotiations.