Orange County Sheriff George Contois said he fears a proposed 28% reduction in county funding — about $160,000 — could send his department into financial ruin.
“We’re running ourselves ragged,” Contois said of his department’s current financial outlook. “It’s not a good picture.”
The sheriff’s department is so strapped for money, Contois said, that at one point he worried that it might not be able to pay its bills this month, though he’s staved off that concern for now. At its worst, cash on hand has dipped below $30,000, he said.
In Vermont, each sheriff’s department receives funding from its county government, as well as more limited funding from the state. Further funding comes through individual contracts, such as for municipal policing and court security.
Orange County’s assistant judges, who oversee the county budget, will host a preliminary public budget hearing on Wednesday afternoon at 4:30. Residents can attend via WebEx, a video call platform used by the judiciary.
When George Contois took over the Orange County department last February, 17 of 21 deputies left with the outgoing sheriff, Bill Bohnyak. Contois, lacking the necessary workforce, pulled out of policing contracts with towns, diminishing vital revenue to his faltering office.
At the time, Orange County’s two assistant judges warned Contois to expect less money in his second year, as the judges feared that certain payments made to former sheriff Bill Bohnyak had overstepped the legal authority granted to the county.
“We were very frank with Sheriff Bohnyak, and also with George Contois,” Joyce McKeeman, Orange County assistant judge and president of the Vermont Association of County Judges, said in an interview. “We’ve consulted with legal counsel. We believe that this is the correct interpretation.”
The interpretation McKeeman and her fellow Assistant Judge Laurel Mackin have made refers to Town of Stowe v. County of Lamoille, a 1976 Vermont Supreme Court case that dealt in part with what counties can — and can’t — pay for.
That decision asserted that “the assistant judges may, at their option, authorize the employment of a secretary to assist the sheriff,” the justices wrote at the time, but “(n)o other statutory authority spelling out the employment of salaried personnel for the sheriff by the county exists.”
Reading that decision, Orange County’s assistant judges began scaling back funding to the sheriff’s department last year, nixing funding to one of the sheriff’s “duty clerks,” who held both administrative and dispatching responsibilities.
In their proposed budget for 2024, the judges cut two more duty clerk positions, replaced by a lump sum to the sheriff’s department to hire two people to fulfill secretarial and bookkeeping duties at slightly higher wages than previous years, according to the judges.
If enacted, the changes would cut the county’s funding of sheriff personnel by more than 50%, from about $329,000 budgeted in 2023 to about $162,000 in 2024.
The proposed county budget would also cut funding for vehicle leases and fuel, as well as mobile phones, while greatly increasing funding for training. An attempt by an outside firm to audit the Orange County Sheriff’s Department failed earlier this year due to the department’s messy books, but not before the auditor discovered the sheriff had been paying for former employees’ cell phones.
(Contois said the department’s cell phone plan included 26 lines. He currently has six law enforcement officers on the payroll, including himself, he said.)
Assistant judges in other counties — each county has two judges — provide similar funding to the funding Orange County’s judges are proposing in 2024. Windham County provides a lump sum to fund two and a half positions, according to Assistant Judge Lamont Barnett.
Like Orange County’s proposed budget, Bennington County funds two positions, and plans to pivot toward a lump sum approach in the future, according to Assistant Judge Mary Frost.
Mark Anderson, Windham County sheriff and president of the Vermont Sheriffs’ Association, said he believes the limited legislation and case law governing sheriff funding by the county could benefit from modernization.
“It’s structurally and systematically confusing for sheriffs, and it’s structurally and systemically confusing for assistant judges,” he said.
With that confusion in mind, more experienced sheriffs and side judges are educating greener colleagues about how to interpret rules around county budgets, according to Anderson.
Contois, though, said he believes Orange County’s assistant judges are concerned with pleasing taxpayers, not following the letter of the law. By cutting his budget, the county’s budget as a whole would be cut by about 15%.
“There’s plenty of leeway for the side judges to do all kinds of things they’re claiming they can’t do,” he said. “The side judges were apparently more merciful with (Bohnyak) than they were for me.”
Currently recuperating from surgery in Arizona, Contois said he plans to return to Vermont on Thursday. Asked about his department’s total budget, including other sources beyond the county, he said he didn’t want to venture to guess the 2023 figure. He directed specific questions to his bookkeeping staff, but no one picked up the phone at the sheriff’s office on Tuesday.
For their part, the side judges, who approve the county budgets, said they would welcome clarity on what the county can and can’t fund.
“We wouldn’t take a legal challenge in any way personally,” assistant judge Laurel Mackin said.
Her colleague, McKeeman, agreed.
“We’ve taken an oath to be faithful to the law,” she said. “And that’s what we believe we’re doing.”
