Former elected official Christopher Paasch appeared before the Curry County Board of Commissioners on Wednesday to make a formal pitch to ask voters to create a service district in an effort to rebuild the sheriff’s office.
Paasch, who retired from the Board following the 2022 election, brought Sheriff John Ward with him, and urged commissioners on Wednesday to declare their intention to form a Curry County Law Enforcement Service District and schedule the first of two public hearings Oregon statute requires to place the measure before voters next May.
The proposed service district would be funded through a property tax of $1.12 per $1,000 of assessed valued property and would generate roughly $4.2 million annually, Paasch said. The revenue would pay for eight patrol deputies, a civil deputy, an administrative assistant, two sergeants, one lieutenant and the sheriff.
Curry County commissioners last week proceeded with a proposed partnership with Gold Beach to create a school resource and community resource officer (SRO/CRO) position using opioid settlement dollars.
But state procurement laws and the lack of a proposed contract is keeping the Board from moving forward on a request from jail commander Lt. Jeremy Krohn to provide addiction treatment services to inmates using those same settlement dollars.
The county would have to send out a request for proposals to service providers before it moves forward with telehealth opioid abuse disorder treatment at the jail, Finance Director Keina Wolf told commissioners at a special meeting Friday.
“More than likely there is more than one place that can provide us with telehealth capabilities and we need to give equal opportunity for people to apply for those contracts,” she said. “I know [Krohn] did say he reached out and had spoken with different individuals, but there’s not a contract attached so we don’t know what the not-to-exceed number would be and we don’t know what services exactly are going to be provided.”
Crescent City councilors last week supported a proposed partnership with South Coast Community Aquatics in Brookings to give Del Norte County pool patrons a place to swim when the Fred Endert Municipal Pool closes for construction in December.
But on Monday, SCCA President Val Early told the Brookings City Council that discussions about how the arrangement would work are still preliminary. She floated the idea of instituting a community pass for patrons on both sides of the state line since Crescent City and SCCA would be funding the program. The details still needed to be ironed out before the agreement goes before the Brookings City Council for approval, she said.
“If we’re able to put that together and [if] you feel like that’s a worthwhile project, that would be a pilot program for us to be able to gauge what our winter activity would be,” Early said. “If we’re able to put together, this collaborative effort would start to happen in December and would go through February because those are the months the Crescent City pool is going to be closed.”
The Fred Endert Municipal Pool is expected to undergo upgrades to its HVAC system as well as its pool deck and locker room floors. As a result, the pool will be closed from December through February, City Manager Eric Wier said.
Under the proposed agreement with SCCA, the nonprofit organization that took over management of the Brookings pool in 2023 would be responsible for facility-related costs. This includes heating the outdoor pool to between 83 and 84 degrees Fahrenheit, Wier told the City Council at its Oct. 21 meeting. Crescent City would provide the lifeguards and supervisory staff needed to operate the pool, he said.
Curry County commissioners considered two proposed uses for opioid settlement dollars on Thursday. The first proposal was an agreement with Gold Beach for a school resource officer position, while the second involved opioid use disorder treatment at the jail.
Competing proposals on potential uses for opioid settlement dollars put jail commander Lt. Jeremy Krohn at odds with the Curry County Board of Commissioners on Thursday.
Krohn’s request for $36,000 in opioid settlement dollars to provide telehealth services to inmates struggling with addiction came after commissioners supported a proposed five-year intergovernmental agreement with Gold Beach to create a school resource officer position.
Under that proposal, Curry County would pay Gold Beach $149,100 in opioid settlement dollars for the first year. This cost would cover the officer’s salary and benefits, vehicle accessories and insurance, outfitting for the officer as well as software. The county would continue paying for those expenditures throughout the five-year term of the agreement, which includes a 5 percent cost of living adjustment and step increases for the officer.
During the summer, the school resource officer would transition into a community resource officer, according to Commissioner Brad Alcorn.
Though Curry County Finance Director Keina Wolf said there were enough opioid settlement dollars to fund both programs, Krohn took issue with the SRO proposal. He said he was perturbed that he had to make a presentation to obtain approval to use those funds, but Gold Beach and the school districts benefiting from the SRO position didn’t have to make a presentation.
Without naming who they were, Krohn said he sent the proposed intergovernmental agreement between the county and Gold Beach to “colleagues who handle opioid settlement funds” for review.
“They said you could not fund a full position based on that IGA through opiate money,” Krohn told commissioners. “They conservatively said 20 percent to fund it. So, with that, be prepared for that to come up — that we’re over funding out of the opioid settlement funds. There will be an audit for that.”
Commissioner Jay Trost called for a forensic audit of Curry County’s treasury department and its accounting practices on Thursday, saying that an investigation of past practices revealed it may have short- changed the area’s special districts.
Trost told his colleague Brad Alcorn that he, Finance Director Keina Wolf and the current county treasurer, Nick Vicino, had conducted a reconciliation of the county treasury for two fiscal years leading into the 2023-24 budget season.
That reconciliation revealed that the county had been holding on to tax revenue that belonged to other special districts and had erroneously recorded the transfer of those dollars when they were never actually transferred, Trost said. When the error was discovered, the dollars were no longer available to be transferred, he said.
The reconciliation also uncovered several other errors, Trost said, including bank fees and $66,000 in deposits that hadn’t been recorded and $3.7 million that had been transferred into other accounts “other than those recorded in the fiscal system.”
“We had overdraft charges to the county bank account that had rolled over for 11 months,” Trost said Thursday. “We had $601,180.32 in deposits that weren’t recorded in the fiscal system for up to three months — we were obviously behind in our reconciliation by two years. And we had over $32 million in bank adjustments during that time period.”
A 75-year-old Brookings woman sustained facial injuries after someone threw an apple into the crowd at a Harris/Walz rally Friday.
The woman, who asked that her name not be used for fear of harassment, said the apple hit her left eye and fractured the orbital bone. She said she sustained scratches to her cornea and has had to put off cataract surgery. She said she had just had surgery on her right eye.
“I was just standing there waving the Harris/Walz sign and, bam!” She told Redwood Voice Community News on Monday. “We were getting some fair response — people honking horns and waving, so we were all waving back and stuff — and then, wham!”
Wednesday’s Curry County Board of Commissioners meeting
Roughly two weeks after they retired one of the county’s police dogs, the Curry County Board of Commissioners faced tough questions from the man who made the canine’s purchase possible.
Dick Wilson, a Brookings-based realtor who donated $14,000 to the county to purchase D’Arvit, asked commissioners Wednesday why they hadn’t contacted him before turning the dog over to his former handler.
Commissioners spent about 35 minutes giving Wilson a timeline of the circumstances surrounding the dog’s retirement, including Sheriff John Ward’s statement at a July 29 meeting that he was a “dirty dog” because he didn’t have enough training. At the end of the exchange, Wilson said he wouldn’t do anything more for the county.
