Butler County Sheriff’s Department to lay off custodian, four deputies

Butler County Sheriff Mark Dobbs is seeking “a happy medium” as he tries to balance his budget amid funding shortfalls, which have prompted the need to lay off five employees.

“Due to funding shortfalls, we are faced with having to lay off several officers,” said Sheriff Mark Dobbs. “We’ve seen this coming for a while and had hoped it could be avoided.

“Unfortunately, it is just something that has to happen.”

Dobbs said his department is operating on “1990s revenue. The cost of operations is just so much higher these days.

“Unfortunately, manpower is usually one of the first things to be cut.”

The cost savings of the layoffs is subjective as it depends on how long “we keep them off,” Dobbs said. “If we keep off for six months, the savings would be approximately $90,000.”

The layoffs, the sheriff said, started in March.

“We laid two people off — one deputy/process server and the custodian,” he said. “Next week, there will be three more deputies laid off for an indefinite amount of time.”

Two of the impending layoffs are of supervisors, Dobbs said.

Although Dobbs did not identify the employees by name, he said, who was to be laid off was a “dollar-and-cents decision. Several of the layoffs are of ranking members of the sheriff’s department.”

The laid-off employees, Dobbs said, will be able to collect unemployment benefits until such time as finances improve and they can return to work “so long as the financial situation improves”

If the financial situation does not improve, Dobbs said, the layoffs could become permanent.

“We’ve operated in the red at times, and the last thing I want to do is see someone go without a pay check, but we have to try to maintain a positive balance with our finances,” Dobbs explained,

The shortfall in revenue is “not necessarily related to the pandemic,” Dobbs said. “Some of it is, but it is something I have foreseen happening (since) the beginning of the year.

“I knew that at about midway, we were going to have to lay some people off.”

Dobbs had similar concerns at the beginning of 2019, but layoffs weren’t necessary.

“The sales tax these days are flat,” Dobbs said. “They are not expanding much.”

Dobbs said several “funding mechanisms” also have been taken away or eliminated, such as the department’s concealed carry permits.

“That went from a $50,000 revenue stream to about nothing,” he said.

Civil process revenue also is down to almost nothing because the courts have been shut down due to the pandemic, Dobbs said.

“We hope that it (the layoffs) helps and that it makes a difference early on, so they don’t have to remain laid off for a long period of time,” Dobbs said.

The department will receive its next payment on June 10 from the one-quarter cent sales tax dedicated to law enforcement purposes, Dobbs said.

“It has been off from what it usually is, and we expect it to be way down due to the COVID(-19 pandemic),” Dobbs said.

The department, Dobbs said, is not scheduled to get another “general revenue boost” from the county until September.

“We’ve had to take our general revenue quarterly payments earlier in order to make ends meet,” said Dobbs, who indicated the money to be received in June was asked for in March.

Every two weeks when payroll “rolls around it’s a very stressful time to figure out how to make payroll,” Dobbs said.

At this time, Dobbs is hopeful the layoffs will help “us find a happy medium to where everything balances, and we don’t end up with a negative balance to where we can’t pay our bills.”

With the layoffs, “there is going to be a diminishing of services,” Dobbs said. “That’s just all there is to it, meaning less patrol, less officers out on the street.

“It definitely creates a less safe work environment for the other officers, and that’s probably my biggest concern.”

Dobbs said his department was “greatly understaffed before these layoffs happened.

“This will only cause more delays in response times, as well as delays in investigative work of cases being investigated.”

The layoffs, he said, also will delay the processing of new or renewal CCW permits.

Fourteen deputies, including the chief deputy, will remain after the layoffs, said Dobbs, whose department’s staff will decrease from 46 to 41 employees

Dobbs said the State of Missouri is also about $400,000 in arrears on reimbursement of prisoner board.

What has been paid thus far “has helped get some back expenses paid,” but the money was owed, so “it was money already allocated for other things,” Dobbs said.