Payroll tax, special district among public safety group’s funding ideas for Lane County

Too few deputies for rural areas, a lack of stable jail funding and an underfunded district attorney’s office topped the concerns of a citizens’ task force looking at ways to pay for better public safety services in Lane County.

Leaders of the 11-person group – which met for more than a year – presented ideas Tuesday to county commissioners. The ideas included a new payroll tax or the creation of a special district with property taxes devoted to public safety, either of which could raise tens of millions annually.

The discussion came just a few hours after commissioners gave final approval for the county’s annual budget, which included cuts that add up to 80 full-time positions. 

While members of the Public Safety Funding Task Force generally agreed on the problems most in need of additional funding, “there’s not consensus on what people think the solution is,” Courtney Griesel, a co-chair of the group, told the five commissioners.

The public safety discussion on Tuesday mostly centered on ways to add at least $27 million in revenue, an amount that would include $22 million to “increase rural patrol to match the state average in deputies per 1,000 residents” and $5 million to add more prosecutors to the Lane County District Attorney’s Office.

The $22 million would pay for 68 additional deputies, according to the presentation given by Griesel, formerly an economic development manager with the city of Springfield, and co-chair Faye Stewart, a former county commissioner.

A payroll tax could be put in place without voter approval, but should commissioners opt to move forward with the ideas “all of this stuff should go to the voters,” Griesel said. “These are very big conversations. This is a very big sort of marriage of need and resources. So ask them.”

The group’s report estimates that $35.3 million in new revenue is “needed to bring all of the presented options and public safety components within the Lane County public safety system up to an acceptable standard of service.”

Commissioners agreed after the presentation to schedule a work session to further discuss ways to bolster public safety funding.

David Loveall, chair of the Lane County Board of Commissioners, asked county staff for the amount that might at least preserve the current level of patrol deputies for rural parts of the county.

“We don’t have to have $22 million next year to move this needle forward,” Loveall said. “What I got was, we had to have about two-point-some million to maintain what we have, replace some of the rural sheriffs [cut recently] and progress forward a little bit.”

Commissioners in 2023 ordered the creation of the task force, which did not include any staff from the sheriff’s office or district attorney’s office. The group first met in April 2024.

The sheriff’s office and the Youth Services Division receive voter-approved levy funds to support the jail and youth detention beds. Documents prepared for county commissioners stated that, since that jail levy, first approved in 2013, “no previous efforts resulted in successful long-term changes to public safety funding in Lane County.” Voters in May 2023 approved the five-year jail levy.

But past county leaders have recognized the need.

“Over the past three decades, no less than five workgroups have reviewed, studied, and proposed solutions for public safety funding, including a 1992 revenue review task force and a more recent 2005 effort,” the document stated.

Sheriff Carl Wilkerson attended the meeting, answering some questions from commissioners.

In recent interviews with Lookout Eugene-Springfield, Wilkerson and Lane County District Attorney Christopher Parosa have spoken about a need for new funding.

“We have one less Criminal Division prosecutor than we had in 1985 and you know, of course, that’s at a time when we had a 40% lower population here in Lane County,” Parosa said.

Parosa said this has resulted in high caseloads at a time when the complexity of prosecutions has increased, given the adoption of technologies like body cameras worn by police officers.

“It can take hours and hours and hours to ultimately review surveillance, video, body cameras and things of that nature, which just means that a prosecutor today cannot handle as many cases as they once did,” Parosa said. 

Between 5,000 and 6,000 cases are typically evaluated each year, Parosa said, with the office declining to prosecute some 25 to 30 percent of cases. There are 24 prosecutors in the Criminal Division.

“That’s a lot of cases for 24 people to handle,” Parosa said.

Wilkerson, sworn in this month after briefly serving as acting sheriff following the retirement of Cliff Harrold earlier this year, also has talked about the need for stable funding to patrol the rural areas of Lane County, which covers a geographic area roughly the size of Connecticut.

“It’ll be one of my priorities is to find stabilized funding for patrol and corrections. I would love to get off the levy system to run a jail. And we need to at least find a way to pay for what we currently have, so we’re not fighting every year for patrol positions,” Wilkerson said in a previous interview.

Wilkerson, speaking last week, said, “It has to be the voters. Ultimately, I think, I don’t think there’s really a way to fix this long term without having the voters’ approval.”

Cuts made in the just-approved 25-26 fiscal year budget included less than 2% to the sheriff’s office and district attorney’s office. Within the general fund, the cuts were less than to other central services provided by the county, which on average had cuts of about 6%, according to the county’s budget document.

The final vote Tuesday approving Lane County’s budget came after commissioners acknowledged cuts not to one department, but many.

“Everybody’s feeling the pain,” Commissioner Laurie Trieger said.

Property taxes, a major source of revenue, are a big part of the budget story.

For the 12-month period ending June 30 of next year, the approved budget includes a projection that property tax revenue to the county will increase by about 3.5 percent compared to the 2024-25 fiscal year.

This projection does not affect the property tax rate, however. Taxes owed by a property owner are based on assessed value and combined tax rates from various districts in which a property is located, plus any assessment, according to the county’s website. The county’s permanent property tax rate is set at $1.28 per thousand, according to county spokeswoman Devon Ashbridge, and has not changed since the 1990s.

Without changes to a property such as the addition of a new structure, yearly increases to a property’s assessed value are capped at 3%, a limit set by the state’s constitution.

“Our budget does not affect the amount people pay in property taxes; however, the amount people pay in property taxes affects our budget,” Ashbridge said in an email.

The Public Safety Funding Task Force report noted a “chronic lack of funding for public safety” in Lane County dating back to the 1980s, and the presentation Tuesday noted that historical losses in timber harvest revenue and the county’s low property tax rate contribute to the underfunding, as well as expenses far outpacing revenues.

“In preparing for the Fiscal year 2025-2026 budget, Lane County estimated expenses increased by more than 9 percent over the previous year while revenues only increased by 3 percent in the General Fund,” the report states.

The final budget – approved unanimously by the five county commissioners – trims expenses through the loss of what adds up to the equivalent of 80 full-time positions (some are half-time) and other cuts.

There won’t be widespread layoffs of county workers, but out of the 80 positions lost, a combined total of 18 full-time equivalent positions have workers in place, Ashbridge said. It isn’t clear yet, based in part on bargaining agreements in place, how many of those workers might be able to shift to other positions in the county.

The approved budget includes funding for 2002 full-time positions.

The final budget includes $137.9 million for the county’s general fund, which pays for many county services. The full $1.23 billion budget includes money in other funds; typically, those funds include money that can only be used for a specific purpose.