Kootenai County sheriff’s candidates debate need for larger jail

For over a decade Kootenai County officials have wrestled with how to tackle jail crowding knowing that voters don’t want to raise property taxes to pay for a construction project.

As he comes to the end of his first term, Sheriff Ben Wolfinger continues to push for more jail beds. The share of inmates who are felons has grown to 70 to 75 percent of the jail population – “the people you really want in jail,” he said.

Wolfinger also believes the county spends too much housing overflow inmates in other jails around the region. Including transportation costs, the county has shelled out $3.2 million over the past five years to keep inmates in other lockups.

After years of weighing proposals to build a larger county jail or expand the one built 30 years ago, county officials recently decided to have an architect design an addition that could be funded from county reserves.

Wolfinger said he’d like to see an additional 150 beds, plus a 24-bed medical unit, for the 327-bed jail next to the sheriff’s office just north of the county fairgrounds. On Friday, the jail was over capacity at 345 inmates.

No new taxes are needed to pay for an expansion, the sheriff said. “They’ve got money in the bank to pay for it.”

A bigger jail may be warranted, said his GOP primary challenger, John Green, but he questions if the existing jail needs to be as full as it is.

“I’m going to be blunt about it, there are a lot of games being played with the census in the jail. And they’ve been doing this for quite a while,” Green said.

Felons who end up back in jail on minor offenses and probation violators might not need to be behind bars, Green said. “We can’t just say, oh, they’re felons, so we have to keep them in jail.”

Wolfinger replied, “That’s not the sheriff’s call. We don’t get to chose who comes here, especially on probation violations.” Judges and parole officers control how full the jail is, he said.

Still, Green said he suspects the sheriff’s department keeps the jail as full as possible to bolster the argument for a new or larger jail.

“Bureaucracy always wants to build itself,” he said. “Nobody wants a smaller sheriff’s department if you’re the sheriff. I may be the exception to that.”

Wolfinger countered that the jail population is a function of the county’s increasing population and rising crime.

“We’re booking more felons than we’ve ever booked before,” he said. “It’s not just our agency, it’s all agencies” using the jail. “We’re not padding the jail.”

Slowing the loss of deputies

The two candidates are more in agreement on the need to boost wages in the sheriff’s department to limit turnover and attract good employees.

When he took office, Wolfinger had 45 jobs to fill in the department, which includes patrol and investigations, the jail, the 911 center and the county drivers license office. It was a vacancy rate of nearly 15 percent.

He vowed to slow the loss of deputies to higher-paying agencies in the Inland Northwest. His deputies earned about 30 percent below the local market average, which includes the Spokane Police Department.

“I was losing one about every two months,” he said.

Recruiting and training replacements is expensive and time-consuming. It takes almost a year before a rookie deputy is cleared to patrol solo.

To reduce staff turnover, the county gave 110 sheriff’s employees a pay raise just over a year ago. Depending on years of service, they make $1.50 to $2.50 an hour more.

Since then, just two deputies left, Wolfinger said. The vacancy rate is down to 4 percent.

“That was a first step; there needs to be more steps,” he said.

Jail deputies have gone two years without a raise, and the sheriff aims to improve their pay and continue to boost wages for those in patrol.

Green said he agrees that wages for patrol and detention deputies should stay competitive in the job market.

“We want to attract people who will make this a career,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said for a department where people will stay for 30 years.”

But first he would determine the appropriate number of patrol deputies needed and make efficient use of the current budget before he went to the county commissioners to ask for more money. The sheriff’s office could pare down its ranks of administrators and put more people on the streets, he said.