Thumbnail: Curry County Sheriff John Ward and his staff, Sgt. Synthia Westerman and Lt. Jeremy Krohn, met with the Board of Commissioners on Thursday to discuss the office's budget. | Screenshot A nine-month long stalemate between the Curry County Board of Commissioners and the sheriff’s office seems to have thawed. But while both sides, including Sheriff John Ward, met in the same room Thursday to discuss the 2025-26 budget, their differences continue. Still, Director of County Operations Ted Fitzgerald said he hopes that they can reach a compromise and decide what role each plays in county government without moving forward with the Board’s petition for a declaratory judgment. “If we can just acknowledge and accept the role of each party … and realize that cohesion and working together between the two entities is necessary … we’ll be able to deliver services,” he told Redwood Voice Community News following Thursday’s budget workshop, which was the third time both sides met since conflict arose between them in September 2024. “We got to some of the fundamental questions today. We don’t have answers to them yet, but I think we’re on the way to getting them, and the sheriff’s office [has] their concerns that are valid.” The Curry County Board of Commissioners is expected to adopt a 2025-26 budget on June 30, Fitzgerald said. He described it as status quo, adding that the concerns the sheriff and his staff raised won’t be resolved by July 1, but staff will “immediately start work on the supplemental process for the sheriff’s office and for some of the other departments.” Commissioners also agreed on another meeting with Ward and his staff at 11 a.m. Tuesday. On Thursday, Ward and jail commander Lt. Jeremy Krohn and Sgt. Synthia Westerman, who leads the communications division, raised concerns about the Board’s plan to allocate five road deputies, one forest patrol deputy, one marine patrol deputy, one community resource officer and an animal control and civil service deputy to the CCSO. Ward also noted that the county’s emergency services division would fall under the sheriff’s office umbrella, according to the 2025-26 budget plan. Board of Commissioners Chairman Jay Trost said the budget plan would allow five deputies to patrol 20 hours a day, seven days a week, an increase from the current schedule of 10 hours a day Monday through Friday. The current budget proposal calls for two sergeants and two lieutenants at the CCSO. According to Ward, this means that the lieutenant and sergeant within the patrol division, the sergeant heading the forest, marine patrol and Search & Rescue programs as well as the corrections sergeant are eliminated. “It’s all on my shoulders to supervise the entire sheriff’s office,” he said Thursday. “It doesn’t work that way.” Westerman pointed out that while the Board’s budget plan allows five deputies to be on patrol 20 hours a day, that won’t be the reality once the new fiscal year starts Krohn noted that the sheriff’s office has to be better about recruiting new deputies. Once they do hire someone it takes about eight weeks to conduct background checks and psychological evaluations. A new hire also has to go through the academy, which starts Sept. 22. “They graduate from the academy on Jan. 30, 2026. Those are patrol positions,” he said. “They are not accepting applications at this time because of the state’s shortfall. We may not be able to put someone into the academy [and] get boots on the ground until after 2026.” In a message to Redwood Voice, Krohn said the CCSO is committed to the budget discussions, which is why they asked to meet next week rather than in July. “It’s going to sound super cliche, but in the modern era of policing, and with the police reform movement, it is unacceptable to have cops out without supervision,” he said. “Not saying we have bad deputies, but they still need to have a supervisor.” Curry County’s total budget, which includes all revenues and expenditures, is about $64.3 million, according to the county’s budget message posted on its website Tuesday. However, Trost said, with $26 million in its Road Department Reserves, the county’s actual budget is about $37 million. Curry County is projected to receive $2 million in property tax revenue and about $2.3 million in transient lodging tax revenue for the 2025-26 fiscal year, according to the budget message. Of the $2.3 million in TLT revenue, about $700,000 will go into the county’s general fund and $1.6 million will be used for “tourism and promotion uses.” County leaders have also elected to receive about $944,000 in timber revenue from the Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands, also known as O&C lands, within its jurisdiction. According to Trost, those O&C dollars are in lieu of money the county would have received through the Secure Rural Schools Act. Receiving those funds will allow the county to cover increased staffing costs, including cost of living adjustments and regular step increases for all departments. No staff layoffs were necessary for the 2025-26 fiscal year largely due to “last year’s monumental effort to ensure that staffing expenses were proportional to available revenue.” After Curry County voters rejected a property tax levy to fund a 24-7 sheriff’s office in May 2024, county officials made cuts across the board resulting in 17 people losing their jobs. In the CCSO, 10 road deputy positions were eliminated last year as well as a captain, two detectives and a sergeant/K9 unit. As a result of those cuts, the sheriff stated that his deputies would work from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday. He directed the public to a self-report form for most calls for service, saying that he wouldn’t send a deputy into the field without backup. On Thursday, Trost said the proposed 2025-26 budget does call for two lieutenants and two sergeants, despite statements from the sheriff and his staff that there are no supervisors. “Who you choose to supervise is up to you,” Trost told Ward. “For instance, dispatch used to be under the jail. Lt. Krohn can oversee the sergeant in dispatch [and] you’d be supervising Krohn.” Trost said supported including five deputy positions in the 2025-26 budget because of complaints he and his colleagues were getting from constituents when no one responded to their calls for service. According to Trost, the public is told there are only three deputies to respond to the entire county. “What’s always discounted are the individuals who are leading those deputies and have the ability to go out and probably are going out, but it’s never being relayed,” he said, adding that the lieutenants, sergeants and the sheriff himself, in addition to the forest patrol and marine patrol deputies can also respond to calls for service. “If we’re not going to count the individuals who are eligible to respond to the public and we’re going to be the ones told to take responsibility for it, we’re going to put as many deputies out there as we can and that’s just straight fact.” The 2025-26 budget also establishes an investigator in the Curry County District Attorney’s Office, which can be a “force multipier” for the CCSO’s patrol division, Trost said. According to sheriff’s office staff, there are currently three deputies assigned to fill vacancies at the Curry County Jail. One patrol deputy is expected to be released from jail duty as of July 1, Krohn said. Ward said his office’s priority is to fill those jail positions and get the patrol deputy out, but it’s difficult to attract and hire them, and to keep them, when there are no benefits. He said he would accept a community resource officer position as well as a part-time civil deputy, but couldn’t take on animal control. “We don’t have the resources to do that,” he said. “You’re just setting us up for failure.” Fitzgerald pointed out that there’s a difference between the sheriff refusing to accept animal control and saying he doesn’t have the resources to deliver those services. On Thursday, Fitzgerald told Redwood Voice that he hopes the July 1 hearing date set for the declaratory judgment would no longer be needed. “The commissioners brought that action so they could define the roles of the sheriff and the Board of Commissioners,” he said. “A simple acknowledgment from both sides that the statutes that govern the role of sheriff and the role of commissioners are the law and we acknowledge them and follow them, I would say that the whole thing could go the way of the buffalo.”