Friction between a county commission and a sheriff is especially vicious when it involves debate over who controls money and assets.

I was a sheriff’s deputy in a suburban Houston sheriff’s office in the mid-1990s while a similar dispute took its course. Now a taxpayer and resident of Fayette County, I would like to offer some insight and opinion.

First of all, you have to understand that there are a couple of absolutes in the current dispute between our sheriff and County Commission over seized drug assets and how they are spent.
The first absolute is that the commission and sheriff are elected officials and do not answer to each other when it comes to the day-to-day operations of their respective realms.

However, the commission does have one advantage over the sheriff. The commission, as the elected political authority over taxpayer dollar expenditure, controls the sheriff’s taxpayer-funded budget; and the sheriff, for better or worse, must come to the commission every year to request and justify his budget.

The second absolute is that county commissioners don’t like being told that there is some aspect of money expenditure by a county department that does not require their blessing.

County commissioners, by their political nature, tend to be a politically arrogant bunch; all in all they are good and well-intentioned people who get caught up in the arrogance of having taxpayer money at their control.

Consequently, in the case of the seized asset awards to the sheriff, the commission can’t seem to get it through it’s thick heads that seized asset awards are not taxpayer dollars, so they have no say-so on how it is spent, whether they like or not, and for good reason.

The commissioners know that their bread and butter to facilitate re-election is “road and bridge,” and that the biggest diversion of taxpayer funds for that purpose is the Sheriff’s Department budget.

So they will squeeze any extra money they can away from the sheriff for that purpose. This is one of several reasons why federal and state guidelines award shared seized drug assets to the control of the chief law enforcement officer of the department receiving the assets and not the elected taxpayer budget authority like the County Commission.

Why? Because the seized asset awards (like those at the center of the current dispute) are the fruits of hard and risky work on the part of dedicated, underpaid, underfunded, and sometimes under-appreciated men and women of our Sheriff’s Office.

They took the risk. They put in the long and hard hours on investigations, arrests, raids and operations. They put up with the complicated bureaucratic legal process of securing the awarding of those assets, so they, not the County Commission, should have the say on how to spend the fruits of their labor on where they think it is needed most, and thankfully they do, whether the commission likes it or not.

Now, the sheriff does not and should not spend these funds in a vacuum without audit oversight.

Guidelines on seized asset award expenditure prohibit certain uses. You can’t spend it on a $5000 plasma TV for sheriff’s or chief deputy’s personal office, or the squad room, or the lounge.
You can’t use it to pay salaries for those extra jailers, or secretary, or dispatcher that commissioners took out of your budget last year.

You can use it to buy law enforcement equipment to supplement the needs and safety of your personnel that otherwise they would not get because the line item funding you requested for it was denied and put in “road and bridge” by the commissioners.
You can buy new traffic radars, tactical and safety equipment, updated ballistic vests, etc.

You can pay informants, fund a few undercover cell phones, pay rent for an undercover office, or buy new surveillance equipment.

You can even buy a new SWAT van or mobile command post, a few undercover cars, an extra patrol car or two, and even a new helicopter.

But, if you decide to use seized asset awards for these items, be ready to justify the money you spend even though it did not come out of taxpayer funds.

Why? Because you were elected, and you owe us an explanation if we ask for it; we will make our own minds as to whether it was prudent or not when we go to the ballot box.

The sheriff and the County Commission (and in particular Mr. Dunn and Sheriff Johnson) need to call a “cease fire” and find some middle ground where they can address both their concerns and interests while keeping autonomy in discharging their elected responsibilities and duties.

The latest incident where county fiscal employees were detained by sheriff’s deputies over questioned ownership of some trade-in undercover cars appears quite benign on the surface, but could have turned into something much worse with just little push, lack of discipline, or miscommunication on the part of those involved, and all because of egos of a limited few.
No one wins, and we all lose if they don’t come to a civil understanding.

Public safety and law enforcement service will suffer because the commission will retaliate by manipulating budget strings come next budget.

They will call something else like “fiscal responsibility,” “fiscal restraint” or “budgetary discretion” for the good of the taxpayer.
In the end, the rank and file of the Sheriff’s Office will suffer because in retaliation, the commission won’t grant that pay increase, or the extra car request, or the extra jailer position or deputy budget request, or the extra fuel request, or the request for a new radio system, etc., etc., and then the whole cycle of finger-pointing and friction starts all over again and culminates into another unfortunate incident, and judging from this latest one, maybe something even more serious with possible tragic and unintended consequences.

Put the “high-schoolish” spat to an end over this issue, gentlemen. In this last incident, the political friction came dangerously close to becoming outright personal hostility.
I expect more mature and responsible behavior from elected officials who should be spending less time sparring with each other in public and more time addressing the everyday and long-term challenges of public safety, law enforcement, business development, road and infrastructure maintenance and planning, and other issues that are in the best interests of the county’s citizens who elected you.

Frank Hidalgo
Fayetteville, Ga.

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