Prosecutor Says He’ll Sue Commissioners Adams County Panel Says Budget Overspent

Adams County Prosecutor David Sandhaus has accused the county commissioners of conspiring to oust him from office and has threatened to sue them.

“What you have done is basically illegal,” Sandhaus told Commissioners Shawn Logan, Bill Wills and Bill Schlagel during their meeting Monday.

Sandhaus said he would file his lawsuit within a week. The commissioners last month used an 1890 law to force Sandhaus to post $15,000 in bonds for allegedly overspending his $430,000 budget by $5,038.

The commissioners did not comment on the threat but told Sandhaus they stand by their position on the prosecutor’s office budget.

“You mismanaged it,” Logan told Sandhaus.

“We were notified by the state auditor’s office and by the county auditor that you had overspent your budget and did not have enough money to meet payroll, and you neglected to bring that to our attention.

“We had to get it from other sources,” Logan said. “We were required to take some action, which we did to protect the county from your overexpenditure.”

Sandhaus contends he has been unfairly targeted because he spends more time on criminal matters and less on civil matters than the commissioners want. He said other county offices, including the sheriff’s office and Superior Court, also ran over budget but the public officials heading those departments weren’t required to post bonds to cover the costs.

The commissioners found ways to cover those costs, Sandhaus said.

“It is clear as a bell, under any budget period, that there was more than sufficient money to meet any problem with the budget,” Sandhaus said. “They feel it necessary to single me out.

“Now, we are going to waltz into litigation that’s going to cost this county thousands and thousands of dollars because of their intentional misconduct,” he said.

Some of the claimed deficit even included bills for 1997 costs, Sandhaus said. One $1,600 bill is for a voluntary membership to an association of county prosecutors to which Sandhaus belongs, said Martin Muench, Sandhaus’ attorney.

“They’re pushing up money from 1997 to create a situation where I am over in 1996,” Sandhaus said.

“We’re alleging, first, that there is no overexpenditure and then that they conspired to create one,” Muench said.