Sheriff’s office still looking at 2015 budgetary overspend

by Bill Knowles
TRINIDAD — The Las Animas County Sheriff’s Office is still looking over the 2015 budgetary overspend the county contends could reach between $100,000 to $150,000 before the accounting is finalized.
However Las Animas County Sheriff’s Deputy Sergeant Reynaldo Santistevan, speaking for the sheriff’s office, said he doubted the overspend would reach that high.  “They [the county] haven’t given us the finalized accounting. They’re claiming it is in the neighborhood of $100,000, but we don’t think it’s going to be that high,” Santistevan said. “We got something that showed up Dec. 31, that was something that showed up to have the money for payroll reversed which they had refused to pay.”
The funds that showed up were from another county department fund in the amount of around $12,300.  At that time the sheriff’s office was still short funds to make payroll for Dec. 16, through Dec. 31, along with holiday pay for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, and any overtime pay that was accumulated by the sheriff’s office.
In January, the county commission found around $50,000 in a contingency fund that exists to cover the expenses of an emergency.  They transferred it to the general fund in order to cover payroll for the sheriff’s office for Dec. 16, through Dec. 31, along with overtime pay and holiday pay for Thanksgiving and Christmas. New Year’s holiday pay is still in limbo at this time.
Santistevan noted that, even though the sheriff’s office and the jail are the same department, the budget for the jail is separate from the sheriff’s and by the end of 2015 the jail’s budget still had around $40 thousand in it that the sheriff could pull from.  The jail budget plus the $12,300 the county found brought down the amount overspent to about $12,000 by mid-December of 2015.
The impact to public safety services, where actual policing and response times to events are concerned, were negligible, said Santistevan.  “The employees volunteered to stay on even though they weren’t going to get paid.  “We chose to stay working.”  He was emphatic on that point, referencing a statement in a press release issued by the county dated Jan. 14, 2016.
The press release noted the sheriff had been notified in mid-December 2015 that he was entering negative territory needed to institute cost cutting procedures to salvage the rest of the year.  Even though he knew this, he still allowed his employees to work without pay.  “Public safety isn’t an enterprise, you don’t charge for it each time it is used,” said Sheriff Casias in a previous interview. “It is something that is provided because it is necessary and the county has an obligation to do so.”
For 2015, the sheriff’s office shows it spent $38,000 on vehicle maintenance or repairs.  Fuel was itemized separately in the budget, at $23,000.  In the 2014 budget, $50,000 had been budgeted for both maintenance and fuel costs. This reflects a nearly $11,000 increase in 2015 over 2014.
With the loss of Pioneer Natural Resources from the county, revenues have been in decline for almost a year and property valuations are still falling, making 2017 an even more austere budget year then 2016 has proved to be. With spending restrictions and cuts in employees beginning in 2014, the sheriff’s department is facing the same dilemma as the rest of the Las Animas County government: trying to do as much with far less than in the past.