QuickTake:

With no decisions yet made about possible new tax proposals to pay for more sheriff’s office deputies and district attorney’s office prosecutors, commissioners discussed plans for community outreach to explain funding needs.

Moving forward quickly and building community support are key steps in addressing sheriff and district attorney funding needs, Lane County commissioners said Wednesday, Aug. 27.

“There is an urgency here, especially as we’re facing potential additional cuts,” Commissioner Heather Buch said during a two-hour meeting about long-term public safety funding concerns.

County Administrator Steve Mokrohisky earlier had told commissioners about the state reducing revenue projections by $845.7 million for the current two-year budget period, which he said will force the county to make its own budget cuts.

Commissioners spoke about the importance of community outreach throughout the county to discuss public safety funding and also talking with other jurisdictions about public safety funding plans. Commissioners discussed additional revenue possibilities, including new taxes.

“We can’t skip steps. We have to do all the steps. We just have to do them more quickly than we often have,” Commissioner Laurie Trieger said.

Sheriff Carl Wilkerson and Lane County District Attorney Christopher Parosa both attended the meeting, which followed a citizens’ task force report in June about ways to pay for more patrol deputies and additional prosecutors, which were identified in the report as top safety priorities.

The June report set forward options such as a payroll tax or special district with property taxes devoted to public safety, but did not make a recommendation about how to best pay for top safety priorities that also included the county jail, which currently relies on voter-approved levy funding.

Wilkerson has spoken about a lack of deputies for a county roughly the size of Connecticut. The lack of deputies means slow response times when rural residents call for help. Wilkerson earlier this year said the sheriff’s office “should have a patrol force that at least can adequately respond to domestic violence or assault calls in a timely manner.”

On Wednesday, Wilkerson spoke about specific steps now needed to move forward.

“I think that we probably need to make a road map of what it is we’re going to do to prove to the community that we’re using resources correctly,” Wilkerson said.

Parosa told commissioners about a need for more staffing at the district attorney’s office.

“We have 24 Criminal Division prosecutors. That’s one less than we had in the mid-1980s when we had a 40% lower population,” Parosa said.

As prosecutors have high caseloads, this means “they are not at this point having the requisite time to go through bodycams and other pieces of evidence that exist within modern cases in a criminal setting to fully be able to evaluate those cases in an appropriate way,” Parosa said.

Parosa said the public doesn’t fully understand how the district attorney’s office works.

“I’m hoping to change that, and one of the ways to do that is to ultimately go out to the four corners of Lane County and begin to have conversations about what a district attorney’s office really does,” Parosa said.