Sheriffs can now apply for legislature-funded grants through Oklahoma’s Attorney General. The extra money is appreciated but doesn’t address a root issue many sheriff's offices face.
All 77 county sheriff’s offices are eligible to apply for the funding assistance program, created by lawmakers this year with the passage of Representative Kevin Wallace’s House Bill 2914.
The law appropriates $18 million to the attorney general’s office for the Oklahoma Sheriff’s Office Funding Assistance Grant Program, awarding $150,000 to $300,000 via cash injections to sheriff’s offices. Award amounts depend on each county’s property tax revenues; the poorest counties qualify for the most money.
The money can be used for pretty much anything that qualifies as a legal expense for sheriffs, with one important exception: deputy and staff salaries. Logan County Sheriff Damon Devereaux said that’s a problem because sheriff’s offices have a hard time with deputy retention. They can’t pay enough to keep good officers around, he said.
“Trying to keep consistent services, consistent training, and stuff like that is really tough based on what I pay versus what just, you know, five blocks away, Guthrie PD pays,” Devereaux said.
He’s served three terms as the Logan County Sheriff, and said he’s lost count of how many deputies have exited his office to work at better-funded municipal agencies nearby.
The bill does address deputy and sheriff salaries one way, by raising their salary ranges to $44,000 to $75,000, but Devereaux said he and other Oklahoma sheriffs are hesitant to make any long-term commitments to employees or large recurring expenses, even with extra money flowing in.
Ray McNair, the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Sheriff’s Association, said the lowest-paid sheriff in Oklahoma right now earns around $32,000.
“We’re kind of at the bottom of the barrel,” McNair said. “We can't compete with municipal law enforcement. We can't compete with tribal law enforcement. We can't compete with state law enforcement.”
So, while raising wages for deputies and sheriffs sounds good, he said doing so is risky because the money isn’t guaranteed every year.
“Each year now we'll have to go out and fight for that $18 million,” he said. “Not knowing what the future of the legislature would be, we can't risk this being used on salaries and then the county be exposed to having to pick those salaries up, or you have to just tell them ‘we don't have the money’”
For now, Sheriffs in Oklahoma plan to tap into the money pool to pay for equipment and infrastructure, like new radio systems, vehicles and body cameras, among other single-purchase items — and stay reliant on property tax revenue to pay people what they can.
And that’s just where the problem is, McNair said: in the way county governments, and most of their utilities and services — like law enforcement — are funded. They depend on revenue from property and sales taxes to pay for their core services, and some counties just don’t collect enough.
“If you’ve got a lot of farmland, you're not going to get any tax on that farmland,” McNair said, pointing to the slew of tax exemptions for agricultural land and related purchases.
Counties with land that is largely owned by the state have a similar problem, he said, because state-owned land doesn’t produce tax revenue for counties.
“You go out like to Cimarron County, 80% of that property out there is owned by the state of Oklahoma, there's no property tax being paid,” he said. “And 20% of the county can't support its government, you know, effectively.”
McNair said the problem is just as dire in counties like Harmon, Harper, Kiowa, Cotton and Tillman counties, among many others.
Sheriff pay was a bargaining chip for lawmakers during the budget process
McNair said the bill Gov. Kevin Stitt eventually signed into law isn’t what he and other sheriffs advocating for pay increases were asking for.
The goal was always for the state legislature to increase pay for county law enforcement and appropriate the money necessary to make that happen, the way Texas lawmakers did last year with Senate Bill 22.
“We took that law and kind of just mirrored it and presented it to the legislature, and we had a favorable senator out there, Darrell Weaver, who was very interested in this and ran the legislation. ” McNair said. “And they bid on it through, you know, the typical mess of the legislature, and the bill just got continuously screwed up to a point where they had $18 million set aside for us. They just didn't know how to write a bill and give us what we needed.”
Republican leaders of the House like Appropriations and Budget Chair Kevin Wallace, Speaker-elect Kyle Hilbert and Floor Leader Jon Echols were in line with a straight pay increase for county law enforcement throughout the legislative session. Republican Sen. Darrell Weaver was the co-author of the bill across the rotunda.
Those efforts were thwarted in May, at the peak of public budget negotiations between the two chambers. At the time, the discussion was between appropriating money strictly for county law enforcement salary raises or for equipment, like cars, radios, and the like.
“These officers are on food stamps and taking jobs back at state agencies just to make more money,” Wallace told Treat during what was a tense public budget meeting.
But Treat worried about tying up the state with a monetary responsibility supporting county-level governments. He offered instead to fund an already established Justice Reinvestment Grant Program dedicated to equipment. He thought it would free up money in sheriffs' budgets to bump pay for their staff and deputies.
"Rather than picking up salaries for people that the state does not employ,” Treat said. “We would like to consider using that existing grant program and put some money in there for the purchase of equipment, not for picking up the burden on salaries.”
For Devereaux, who is also the President of the Oklahoma Sheriff’s Association, the bottom line is that deputies and sheriffs need help with pay. He and other sheriffs are grateful and plan to tap into the available money, he said. Especially since it can be used for one-time stipends for deputies, just not regular, promised bumps to their salaries.
“I mean, we've got some technology issues that we're going to have to overcome with our radio system that's aging, and a few other things,” he said. “So it's, you know, a blessing to have this money. Let there be no doubt about it.”
But that doesn’t change the disparity in pay between county law enforcement and their municipal, state and tribal counterparts. Devereaux knows it firsthand after spending a decade as the chief of police in Guthrie, the seat of Logan County.
“During that time I made about $64,000,” he said. “Currently, I make $59,000 and some change. The current Guthrie chief makes $101,000.”
Devereaux rejected Treat’s notion that the state shouldn’t help pay for the work of county governments. County sheriffs enforce state law at the end of the day, he said, and when someone is charged with a state crime they stay in county jails before attending court and potentially getting transferred to prison.
“We're a constitutional office in the Oklahoma Constitution,” Devereaux said. “Everything we do is the state's business.”
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