Greene County Sheriff Steve Burns met Tuesday with the Law Enforcement Committee to explain staffing at the Sheriff's Department and County Detention Center, or jail, and increases he is proposing in the budget for 2008-09.

Burns has requested nine new positions in the Sheriff's Department. The requests include two dispatchers, two drug officers, one transport officer and four additional officers for the detention center.

The sheriff said he is aware that this is a tough economic year, and said, "We don't expect to get a lot of things we put in the budget" this year.

The Greene County Commission's budget committee is working to address a $2 million gap between requests for funding and projected revenues for next year.

The sheriff's discussion before the Law Enforcement Committee focused mainly on staffing needs, and did not get into details of a propsoals for a new county detention center he later presented to a joint meeting of three committees studying jail needs, as reported in Wednesday's issue of The Greeneville Sun.

Burns started Tuesday's Law Enforcement Committee meeting by reviewing an organizational chart for the various aspects of the Sheriff's Department, and also for the detention center in downtown Greeneville and workhouse off Summer Street.

Last year, Burns requested four new dispatcher/records positions, and received two, he reminded the committee. This year, he is asking for two more.

Burns said dispatch, which serves as the communication link for the department, can be likened to the cockpit of an airplane. "If dispatch crashes, the plane will crash," he said.

Dispatchers work 12-hour shifts, as do patrol officers, and also provide the first step in records-keeping, the sheriff said. Patrol deputies accumulate 160 hours in a 28-day period, and typically, the same dispatcher works with a shift most of the time.

Burns said the Sheriff's Department has only a handful of officers with enough experience to be ready to move up to supervisory positions when the officers holding those positions are ready to retire.

The department has quite a few officers with experience approaching 30 years, the sheriff told the committee. However, the department also has only a handful of officers with experience in the 14- to 30-year range. He showed charts that illustrated this.

"When the experienced people leave, who's going to fill those jobs?" he asked.
Over the past three years, the sheriff said, he has lost 15 officers in the 14-year to 30-year range, with the majority of them going to other law enforcement agencies that pay better, many to the Greeneville Police Department.

The department is "in a little better shape in the jail (detention center)," Burns said. However, the sheriff's chart showed 29 detention officers with one year of service. He said the detention center, or jail, stays in a constant hiring and training cycle.

Burns said he was showing the commission members the staffing charts so that, "Hopefully, you'll have a better understanding, when I talk about this gap being real."

The sheriff also said that, regardless of what kind of budget the county commission approves for next year, he will make as many discretionary shifts as possible to raise the pay of post-certified officers in the patrol and detective divisions.

"A lot of supervisors got good raises last year," Burns said, but patrol officers did not.

The sheriff said he presented his budget "based on these needs."

He said he knows that the county government cannot afford nine new positions this year, "but it doesn't hurt to ask." Burns said he made the requests, and requested the meeting, "because you commissioners need to know what I need."

The sheriff said he would like for the commission to consider reinstating "step raises" for law enforcement officers.

Step raises were replaced in 2004 by the countywide pay scale for all departments, but this year Burns presented a budget that did not follow the scale.

Under the step raise system, new officers got a raise every year for the first five years of their employment, then larger raises every fifth year thereafter, on the anniversary of their hiring.

County Attorney Roger Woolsey told the budget committee early this spring that Burns, as an elected official, has the right under state law to petition in Circuit Court, if he thinks the budget passed by the county commission does not include enough funds for him to efficiently and safely operate the departments he oversees.

"I told the Budget & Finance Committee that, when we had step raises, it worked," Burns said. One reason that step raises worked, he said, is that "not everybody got a step every year," but step raises were budgeted for the full year. "What the commission is trying to do today is give everybody something like a step (raise) every year, and we can't afford it."