“We’re all trying to live within our budgets and I’m looking into everything daily to stick to the numbers,” Kelly said.
Joshua Wendling, Brian Norris, Andrew Miller, Tyler Hayes and Joseph Liming were sworn in as Clark County’s new deputy sheriffs during a ceremony held at sheriff’s office Monday morning, beginning their year-long probationary period at the department.
Sheriff Kelly operates on a $15 million per year budget. This budget must encompass staff salaries, daily costs such as gas used in patrol cars and operational costs for the Clark County Jail — including daily meals and round-the-clock staffing for the jail’s 200-plus inmates.
It is a top priority of the sheriff’s office to ensure that the jail has adequate staffing to ensure the safety and security of the inmates and those employed by the sheriff’s office who work in the jail, Kelly said.
The five new deputies will go through initial training and then be stationed to serve at the Clark County Jail’s modular units, housed in the basement of the sheriff’s office to accommodate overflow of prisoners held in the main jail. The modular units bring the total number of beds at the Clark County Jail to 258 and the jail is usually filled to capacity daily, Kelly said.
With recent changes to state regulations, fourth- and fifth-degree, non-violent felons convicted by the state are housed in county jails instead of being sent to state prisons. These convicted felons are serving longer jail sentences than had been the norm — sometimes 12 to 18 months in the county jail, Kelly said.
“County jails were not originally made for these numbers,” he added.
The shift from convicted persons being housed in county jails was intended to decrease costs at state facilities, but counties are now seeing their operational costs increase.
In the past year, the sheriff’s office has seen a rise in the amount of the yearly budget used for overtime pay, a cost that Kelly hopes will be reduced with the additional manpower. The salaries of the five new deputies will amount to less overall cost than the cost of time-and-a-half pay deputies were receiving for the overtime hours they were working to staff the modular units of the jail, Kelly said.
The Clark County Board of Commissioners approved the hire of the five new deputies in the 2014 budget to staff the modular units. In 2013, the board approved the hiring of two deputies who now work in safety and security roles at county schools, Kelly said.
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