Sheriff John Snaza speaks at a press conference in July outside the Thurston County Courthouse in Olympia.
The Thurston County Board of Commissioners and Sheriff appeared to start the new year off with a resolution to regroup and move past budget tensions on Tuesday.
"It's not us versus you or us versus the budget or the finances or the community," commission chair John Hutchings told the sheriff. "The community values policing, they value their safety."
Last year ended on a fraught note, with the board approving an extra $475,000 to cover overspending in the Sheriff's Office for law enforcement. Sheriff John Snaza said the department had been transparent about its spending and is "underfunded."
The plan voiced in an early-December work session was for Assistant County Manager Robin Campbell to provide support to the Sheriff's Office in 2020 using a "zero-based budget approach" — essentially building a budget from scratch to look at costs. When the Sheriff and Undersheriff visited a work session Dec. 10, Snaza said the department already had done a zero-based patrol budget.
Not quite, Campbell said this week. She had met with Undersheriff Tim Braniff and financial officer Chief Heidi Thomsen on Dec. 17 and looked at a copy of the department's analysis, Campbell said.
"It wasn't really a zero-based budget," Campbell said. "What it is, is a combination of estimates using past budget expenditures and budget assumptions to calculate the budget needs for 2020."
The department's projections, Snaza said at this week's meeting, predict he'll be $691,000 over budget for 2020.
He said two deputies are looking to retire and he won't replace them in an effort to save money. But costs like legally required training and overtime, Snaza said, are out of his control.
Whether the department will undertake a zero-based budgeting process in 2020 remains to be seen.
At Tuesday's work session, Campbell said such a process would be a heavy lift. For one, it would involve the board and the Sheriff agreeing on an acceptable level of service as "a starting point."
And at the end of setting expectations and analyzing, there's still a risk the costs would be higher than the county can afford, Campbell said.
"Then the conversation is, what do you give up to get to a level you can afford?" Campbell said.
County Manager Ramiro Chavez told The Olympian that Campbell will meet with Thomsen and Braniff to talk through different models of zero-based budgeting and options moving forward.
Snaza said he'd be willing to come in and give budget updates to the commission monthly and answer commissioners' questions.
"I'm willing to be as transparent and be as open as I possibly can, because if I haven't said it enough: I want to make it very clear that whatever was the past was the past, and I want to move forward," said Snaza "And I want to do what is best for this county."
The commissioners seemed to share the "put the past behind us" mindset, though Commissioner Tye Menser still made it clear that he wants to see change.
"I'm optimistic, but I just have to restate that the last few years' worth of financial management just isn't tenable for the next three or four years, so that's going to be a tough thing for us to wrangle with," Menser said.
