The approved minutes of the county commission’s Sept. 3 budget hearing have been posted to the Clerk’s board records index, and they are the first primary public record of what the Sheriff’s Office told the board about its budget. Every statement below that is attributed to the minutes comes from page 2 of that document.
According to those minutes, a commissioner put the question and Sheriff Robert Hardwick answered that the office’s additional $3.9 million request was “primarily intended to increase deputy salaries and improve recruitment and retention.” That sentence is the whole of what the record says the money is for, and the minutes carry no further detail on how it is allocated.
The minutes are a summary written by a deputy clerk rather than a transcript, so nothing here is presented as the sheriff’s own wording. They run to seven pages, and they record the hearing as called to order at 5:01 p.m. and adjourned at 6:12 p.m.
The audit the minutes name
The same paragraph lists the subjects the sheriff covered on the plate reader program, and the minutes record that he “discussed the Flock license plate reader system, its costs, data security, required audit, and potential reallocation of funds if the system is removed.” The costs and the retention period have both been reported before, and the audit has not appeared in any document this newsroom has retrieved.
Nothing in the minutes says who requires the audit, who conducts it, what it covers, or whether one has been completed. The minutes also record that the sheriff “emphasized the technology’s role in solving crimes and protecting schools, while noting ongoing discussions with state officials regarding privacy and regulations.”
Six written questions about the program went to the agency’s published media address on Sept. 11, with a deadline of 5 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 14. No written answer has been received by that deadline or since, and the offer to print one in full stands.
The public comment was about the cameras
The minutes summarise six public speakers at the hearing, and five of the six addressed the plate readers or the funding behind them. They appear below in the order the minutes give them, and the minutes record each of them as a statement to the board rather than an exchange with it.
One speaker questioned funding for license plate tag removal and the use of public funds for biometric tracking equipment, and urged the board to deny the budget request. One expressed support for increasing deputy salaries and urged the board to direct more funding toward officers rather than the cameras. One urged the board to remove the cameras from county right-of-way, and one raised cost, effectiveness and constitutional implications. One said funding should support higher salaries and case investigations, and the sixth asked for funding for cold case investigations and for county staff involvement in them.
The minutes record no response from the board to any of the six. They also record no separate vote on the sheriff’s request at this hearing, and the two motions they do record are the tentative millage resolution and the tentative budget resolution, each carried 5/0.
What is still not posted
The Sept. 3 hearing was the first of two, and the second, on Sept. 15, is the one that adopted the budget for the year that began Oct. 1. No minutes of that second hearing appear on the Clerk’s index, and they go to the board for approval on Tuesday as item 24, which names both of the Sept. 15 meetings.
Until that document is approved and posted, the only public record of the vote on the sheriff’s funding is the agenda line scheduling the hearing at which it happened. The Tattler will publish the roll on the second hearing when the minutes carry it.
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