_{Curry County Board of Commissioners Meeting from Dec. 19. Thumbnail: Keina Wolf, the county’s finance and human resources director, sits at the far left on the dais. | Screenshot}

(Update at 2:51 p.m. Dec. 30. Curry County commissioners delayed renewing an employment contract with Finance and Human Resources Director Keina Wolf at their Dec. 19 meeting.)

Curry County commissioners declined to renew delayed renewing an employment contract with their finance and human resources director, Kiena Wolf, at last week’s meeting. 

Wolf, who was in attendance at that meeting, found herself on the defensive against critics arguing that the county couldn’t afford the expense.

One critic, Michele Martin, a member of a Facebook group called Citizens For Curry Justice, criticized Wolf’s proposed salary of $130,000 per year and said the $15,000 professional development allowance it calls for is more than the training budget at the Curry County Sheriff’s Office.

Rod Palmquist, a representative for Teamsters Local 223, which represents sheriff’s office employees, repeated the statement regarding the training budget for Wolf’s department, comparing it with that of the sheriff’s office. He told commissioners that the proposed employment agreement prioritized bureaucracy “over the very safety of the community you were elected to serve.”

A third critic was County Assessor and Tax Collector Kylie Wagner, who said that Wolf, who does much of her work from her home in Lane County, “should be here in the trenches with the rest of us.”

“When I asked about out-of-class pay for all the additional job duties my employees would be taking on after the loss of our [full-time-equivalent employee], Keina, you said, ‘Cuts are cuts and unfortunately we would all have to pick up the slack,’” Wagner said. “I’m answering phones, filing, manning the office when the employees are sick, plus trying to keep up on my day-to-day duties. I’m not sure how you’re planning to do that from Lane County.”

Commissioners decided to wait until after the first of the year to review Wolf’s employment contract. This recommendation came from the county’s director of operations, Ted Fitzgerald, and was endorsed by John Herzog, who attended his final meeting as a commissioner on Dec. 19.

The new Board of Commissioners, including commissioner-elect Patrick Hollinger, will likely weigh in on the issue after Hollinger takes his seat in January.

Under the proposed five-year contract, Wolf’s base salary would be $130,385 annually. That salary would be subject to an annual cost of living adjustment and step increases Wolf would also be given an annual professional development allowance of $15,000, which would include the cost of any travel and lodging that might be required. Any money out of that allowance that hasn’t been used by the end of the fiscal year would roll over, however the annual budgeted amount wouldn’t exceed $25,000, according to the proposed contract.

Under the proposed contract, the county shall reimburse Wolf $500 monthly for travel with a not-to-exceed amount of $6,000 annually.

Wolf pushed back against the criticism levied at her via social media and during public comment by reminding the Board of where things stood on her first day in February 2024.

“We had deposits that were 26 months old that had not been entered into our fiscal system. They may have made it to the bank, but they were not in our fiscal system,” she said. “We had outstanding transactions that were owed to other agencies. Some very small agencies that heavily rely on the taxes that we are supposed to pass through to them. We had $30 million in bank adjustments. These bank adjustments were used in our fiscal system every month to force balance our bank accounts. We had $3 million of errors recorded to the wrong funds therefore misstating other balances and other funds.”

Commissioner Jay Trost refuted comments regarding the proposed personal development allowance in Wolf’s contract, stating that the $15,000 is for the two departments Wolf heads. According to him, the training budget for the sheriff’s office is $34,250, which doesn’t include travel. The total training budget for the last few years, which includes the K9 division, Trost said, is $60,318 annually.

According to Board Chairman Brad Alcorn, Wolf is the fifth finance director Curry County has had since he started getting involved in the county’s budget committee in 2019. As a member of the budget committee, Alcorn said he based his recommendations on information he received from those finance directors as well as an assurance from elected officials back then that Curry County would find other funding solutions instead of continually tapping into its road department reserve fund.

County leaders and the budget committee also discussed placing a levy or service district measure before voters to try to find other sources of revenue, Alcorn said, but that didn’t happen. He said the information he and other budget committee members received prior to Wolf’s employment was flawed.

“If I had known what I know now, I certainly would not have made the recommendations I had made during that time,” he said. “That being said, it really illustrates the pivotal position of the finance director in terms of training, experience and ability.”

When Wolf came to work with Curry County, the county’s previous finance director, Frank Jerome, had left and it had been contracting with the Lane Council of Governments, according to Alcorn.

Curry County commissioners began working with the Lane Council of Governments, or LCOG about a year ago. During a Board of Commissioners meeting in November 2023, Ted Fitzgerald, the county’s director of operations, told commissioners that Curry County hadn’t updated its financial policy since 2000.

An LCOG representative at that time had told Fitzgerald that the county’s method of controlling its “money-in and money-out” on a day-to-day basis put it at risk of losing federal funds, the Wild Rivers Outpost reported.

One recommendation the LCOG representative made was integrating the Caselle government software system into Curry County operations, according to Fitzgerald.

Last week, Fitzgerald said that before Wolf began working with Curry County, county department managers were complaining about the hours they were spending trying to track down their deposits.

“Each department was manually having to do this,” he said. “We attempted to work with the then-treasurer and the then-finance director [and] we got nowhere. I estimated that it’s a couple thousand hours a year total for all the departments together that was wasted on something that should never have been an issue. And that got addressed with the combination of Keina and our new treasurer Nick [Vicino].”

According to Wolf, she came to Curry County with 10 years of experience with the Caselle system. She said she also has a good working relationship with the owners of the Caselle system. Her department is also working on the 2024 audit.

“I’m happy to say that in 10 months, the fiscal department and the treasurer, we are working on up-to-date information, which is critical,” she said. “And that took a lot of hard work. The treasurer makes daily deposits and he records them daily in our fiscal system. Before he goes home every day, I can tell you how much money each department has deposited for that day, which is phenomenal because that means our cash is current at all times.”

Wolf said she is currently the only trained financial person in the finance department. Before she came to work for Curry County, there was a finance director, an assistant finance director and a financial clerk “of some sort.”

The Curry County treasurer also works in the finance department, Wolf said, and she has a 1.5 full-time equivalent employee who helps in the office along with someone that works on payroll and accounts payable tasks.

Wolf also denied that her proposed employment contract amounted to a pay increase, noting that Curry County was paying her $180 an hour when she was contracted from LCOG to work for the county.

Wolf also added that she works an average of 70 hours per week and she’s available “seven days a week 24-hours a day.”

“You know what, there’s nothing that says I can’t live wherever I choose,” she said. “I don’t choose to live in Curry County. It’s totally false to say my husband and I haven’t looked at properties here in Curry County because we have looked at a lot of properties.”

Fitzgerald, who praised Wolf’s expertise in Caselle and said that he didn’t care where a worker was as long as they were effective, said voting on the employment contract may be premature since it was Herzog’s final meeting as a commissioner.

Fitzgerald said he would rather have Hollinger, Herzog’s replacement, be part of the debate.

In addition to discussing Wolf’s employment with Curry County, the Board of Commissioners authorized Fitzgerald to move forward forms connected with a proposed tax levy that, if approved, would pay for five more patrol deputies, a sergeant and two emergency dispatchers in the sheriff’s office.