Sheriff avoids cuts

Deschutes County Sheriff Les Stiles is pulling a fiscal rabbit out of the hat to avoid some budget cuts this year. And the rabbit has Greg Brown's name on it.

"We took a $112,000 hit in January and we're likely to take another $50,000 hit in February," Stiles said last week when asked about the impact on his office of state revenue shortages and the failure of Measure 28.

The combined $162,000 is a reduction in grant-in-aid funding to the county from the state Department of Corrections.

But Stiles is not planning to make $162,000 worth of cuts in his budget.

"On March 11, I anticipate receiving a check for restitution from former Sheriff Greg Brown for $172,000, and I am going to use this to offset our Measure 28 losses for this fiscal year," he said. "I don't mean to make light of it, but the fact of the matter is that now I'm almost glad it took the FBI a year and a half to investigate (Brown's embezzlements) because the timing is serendipitously advantageous to us."

Brown pleaded guilty in federal court to embezzling $172,000 from the county during his term as sheriff. He was defeated by Stiles in a bitterly contested race in the general election of 2000.

He is currently awaiting sentencing for that and an even larger theft from the Sisters-Camp Sherman Rural Fire Protection District while he was on the district's board and served as its budget officer.

Under a plea agreement he agreed to make $561,000 in restitution to the two governmental victims.

Stiles said he is more concerned about the coming fiscal year, 2003-04. The governor's proposed state budget for 2003-05 would leave grant-in-aid money for local law enforcement as short as it is in the current biennium. If the Legislature approves a budget along those lines, the sheriff's office will have to make cuts.

Stiles said he is not sure where his operations will be pared.

"But I can tell you this," Stiles said. "We have already collectively made a decision that we will not cut patrol services at all. Anywhere. We can't.

"The function of the sheriff's office is public safety and that starts with if you dial 911 you're gonna get a deputy. We may not be able to lock 'em up for long but you will get a deputy and somebody will be there to take care of your needs."

He also had good news for the Sisters area: No cuts will be made in the sheriff's operations here.

Those include a Sisters substation which is home base for eight deputies, a school resource officer and an office person. The same fiscal umbrella covers the Sisters office of the JET program, a diversion program for juvenile criminals.

Sisters receives policing services under an annual contract with the sheriff's office. Stiles says the $284,000 contract "doesn't even cover our costs...but I'm OK with that" for the time being, although he acknowledges that eventually the contract will have to be revised.

At the current level "it's about $100,000 less than the cost of operating your police department when it was abolished five or six years ago."

In any event, Stiles firmly declares that "Sisters will see no difference in coverage next fiscal year at all."