Experienced officers have already begun inquiring about working for the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office, Garrett Scott told Redwood Voice Community News the day after the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved his staffing plan.
The Del Norte County sheriff said his proposal to freeze positions that have been vacant for more than a decade in an effort to increase salaries for new and existing employees won’t be the answer to all of his office’s problems, but it will help.
“I [plan] to send five locals to the academy in January,” Scott said Wednesday. “I anticipate several of those being current staff members of the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office. For example, jail deputies that want to work [as] patrol deputies or bailiffs.”
Other than hearing comments from two Del Norte County residents, supervisors signed off on Scott’s staffing plan without discussion on Tuesday. This decision came after supervisors Dean Wilson and Chris Howard on Sept. 10 urged their colleagues to wait on the outcome of a compensation study.
After Scott told them his office couldn’t wait the five or six months it would take to complete the study, the Board of Supervisors asked County Administrative Officer Neal Lopez and Auditor-Controller Clinton Schaad to come back with a recommendation.
That recommendation, which the Board agreed to, freezes three patrol deputy positions and one corrections deputy position. The staffing plan also calls for eliminating a corrections deputy position as well as a corrections technician.
Scott said he may be looking at unfreezing some of those positions during next year’s budget cycle. He noted that the county is still paying for its portion of workers compensation, health insurance and other employee costs despite those positions being frozen.
Scott said these changes enable him to hire a deputy at a higher step in the salary schedule than he had previously been able to. An entry level position now offers an hourly wage of $30, an increase from the previous $26.61 per hour pay, he said.
The change increased overall pay across the department by nearly 15 percent, Scott said. However, he said he anticipates the compensation study will still show Del Norte County being below the industry standard when it comes to a sheriff’s deputy’s salary.
The DNSO is currently down eight patrol deputies. There’s only one full-time bailiff at the courthouse when there should be four. And out of a total of 18 positions at the jail, only 13 are staffed.
There are also three vacancies in the county’s dispatch center, Scott said.
Though he’s already received inquiries about working for the DNSO, Scott said it will take about a year for the public to see boots on the ground.
“[Hiring] requires about 40 hours of work for a background investigator and it takes nearly two months to complete the background [check],” he said. “It will take six months for the academy and another four months to return to the sheriff’s office and complete a state-certified field training program. While I do see a light at the end of the tunnel, I just ask for the public to be as patient as possible.”
On Tuesday, though Wilson said he hopes that the new staffing plan would bring relief to the DNSO, frequent public commenter Sam Strait criticized the proposal. He said he did some checking of his own and told supervisors that a sheriff’s deputy in California earns an average of about $39 an hour with an average annual salary of roughly $82,000. In comparison, Strait said, a new deputy in Del Norte County is paid about $58,000 to $59,000 a year in 2023 dollars.
“You’re not even in the competitive range of what a deputy patrol officer can earn in the State of California,” he said “You’re in the bottom 25th percentile of what is paid to deputy sheriffs in this state, which is significant when you consider that the sheriff’s department is probably the most important part of county government.”
Alicia Williams, a self-described community activist, said she’s concerned the staffing changes and potential salary increases won’t be enough to recruit new deputies. According to her, increasing access to housing for new deputies is the long-term solution.
“A lot of development is happening,” she said. “If we can get these developers to voluntarily set aside a few units we can recruit laterals. People would like to live here. We could make sure we have housing and also bonuses, hiring bonuses, and bonuses for the current staff.”
Williams said she had hoped the sheriff would have been at Tuesday’s meeting to speak about his other proposed changes.
On Wednesday, Scott said there’s a lot to rebuild in his office. He said he’d like to rebuild his narcotics team — a program that has been dormant for roughly five years. There’s a need for full-time officers to investigate sex crimes, property crimes and major crimes, he said, adding that he hopes to ask for Measure R funding for a sexual assault investigator in particular.
“I need to get the basics accomplished first,” he said. “I need to get basic staff and then I can start working on specialty positions that impact the community.”
