By Jesse Farthing
Last week Interim County Administrator George Touart said that it was his budget director, Amy Lovoy, that wanted 40 percent of the Escambia County Sheriff’s Office administrative budget to subsidize the county’s takeover of the county jail. The raiding of the ECSO budget is a relatively new issue that wasn’t brought up when the Board of County Commissioners voted in late June to run the county jail.
At today’s jail transfer workshop, Lovoy, who was back from vacation, pegged that amount to be $4,608,793, which does not include the as-yet-undetermined IT costs, personnel costs and $181,000 in one-time expenses. Personnel discussion will take place tomorrow.
A major point of contention during the discussion was tuition reimbursement for sheriff’s employees who take college courses. The sheriff’s office only has $45,000 budgeted for the purpose of reimbursement, but will have paid out $100,000 by the end of the fiscal year. Lovoy wanted to take 40 percent of the $100,000 ($40,000) from the sheriff’s budget for county use, rather than 40 percent of the $45,000 actually budgeted for that purpose.
Chief Deputy Eric Haines argued that the county should only be able to take a percentage of the actual money budgeted rather than what they paid out, because the sheriff’s office pays out reimbursement for any employee that requests it – taking it out of other parts of the budget – and the county only pays out tuition reimbursement if the funds are available.
Haines said he would have to cut overtime to fund tuition reimbursement if the county were to take money based on expenditure rather than budget.
Other topics of discussion during the meeting included insurance, office space, warehouse space, armories and ammunition – most of which were moved through without any debate. Haines offered to keep the warehouse consolidated and share the functions, which the county agreed to, but there is some debate regarding shared office spaces in the video visitation building that will be discussed further at tomorrow’s meeting.