Two days after they adopted the county’s 2025-26 budget, Curry County commissioners wanted to get started on finalizing job descriptions and finding people to fill those positions. New positions include a public works director, an investigator in the District Attorney's Office, a community resource officer in the Sheriff’s Office and a part-time civil processor and animal control officer, according to Board Chairman Jay Trost. Added on as a last-minute agenda item on Wednesday, Trost said he wanted to get a consensus from his colleagues to allow human resources to create those job descriptions and bring them back to the Board by its next meeting in July for approval. “This would speed things up by two to three weeks potentially so we could have people in these roles by mid-August as opposed to mid-September,” Trost said. Trost and his colleagues Lynn Coker and Patrick Hollinger unanimously adopted the county’s 2025-26 budget on Monday after holding a series of workshops last month. They also set the property tax rate within the county at 0.59 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value as well as approved the budgets for the Curry County 4H Extension Service and the Curry Public Transit Service District. Curry County has a total combined 2025-26 budget of about $64.27 million, according to the county’s budget message included with Monday’s agenda. During a June 20 budget workshop, Trost said the county’s working budget is about $37 million. Roughly $26 million is currently sitting in the county’s Road Department Reserves. On Wednesday, Coker said he also wanted to encourage the sheriff’s office to begin the hiring process. “It’s not necessarily new slots, but it’s filling things like in the jail and such,” he said. Trost pointed out that commissioners approved an employee transfer from the juvenile department to the jail. That individual was a school outreach officer and is now a corrections deputy, according to the county’s staff report. Commissioners also hired a new accounts payable employee in the finance department on Wednesday. Ted Fitzgerald, the county’s director of operations, said his staff could start the recruitment process for the new positions the 2025-26 budget calls for even while job descriptions continue to be ironed out. “The quicker we get it out there, the quicker we’ll get these spots filled,” he said. The county’s budget workshops last month marked what appeared to be a thaw in a nine-month stalemate between Curry County Sheriff John Ward, his staff and the Board of Commissioners. Both sides were able to meet in the same room multiple times and iron out a staffing plan they could agree on. That plan includes employing a lieutenant in the patrol division who would oversee four deputies, a forest deputy and a marine deputy. The community resource officer and part-time civil processor are new positions for the sheriff’s office. The budget also includes the hiring of two sergeants who would work under jail commander Lt. Jeremy Krohn. On Wednesday, however, Georgia Cockerham, a Brookings resident who led a failed tax levy that would have paid for five additional patrol deputies, a sergeant and two dispatchers, rehashed the dispute between the sheriff and the Board of Commissioners. Cockerham pointed to comments Hollinger made on June 4 in to a letter from the Oregon State Sheriff’s Association registering their displeasure at the commissioner recording, and then sharing, the contents of a presentation. She chastised Hollinger for accusing the Curry County sheriff of trying to silence him even though he didn’t write the letter. Ward, however, did post the contents of OSSA’s letter on his Facebook page. Cockerham criticized Hollinger over comments he made in April regarding the sheriff’s marine deputy allegedly submitting a fraudulent report to the State Marine Board. Finally, she said that Hollinger at a May 7 meeting accused the citizens group working on the law enforcement levy of initiating a recall effort against him. “What do all of these false accusations have in common? They are all associated with Sheriff John Ward and/or the sheriff’s office,” Cockerham told commissioners. “Commissioner Hollinger has repeatedly used the term accountability when speaking of himself. But his actions have been quite the opposite given his accusations and his lack of the integrity required to apologize to those he’s wrongly accused.” Hollinger didn’t comment on Cockerham’s statement except to say that he didn’t say anything that was false nor had he reported anything incorrectly. Though a public safety update was also on the agenda, the sheriff did not attend Wednesday’s meeting.