Officials in Delta Township and Eaton County are outlining a path forward to maintaining law enforcement services in the township.
Under the new framework, Delta Township will pay $8 million a year to keep Eaton County sheriff’s patrols — nearly twice as much as the $4.4 million they currently pay.
Some costs were previously covered by the County Sheriff’s Office, but the county can no longer afford to provide those services after voters rejected a millage proposal last month.
Eaton County Controller Connie Sobie began crying after the framework passed unanimously during concurrent meetings Thursday in Eaton County and Delta Township.
“Delta Township worked really hard to look at what options they had,” Sobie said. “You don’t realize what you have when you have a Sheriff’s Department, and ours, too, especially. It was going to be too tough for them, and, obviously they knew, tough for us.”
Eaton County Board Chair Jim Mott said while the rest of the county will still see road patrol services eliminated, this plan keeps the infrastructure in place for the sheriff’s office to be able to build back from in the future.
Eaton County officials have proposed roughly $5.5 million in cuts as they work to finalize the budget for the upcoming fiscal year. But even with those reductions, the budget remains unbalanced.
During a special meeting at the end of May that lasted more than six hours, county commissioners identified the largest proposed cut — about $2 million — to the sheriff’s department. Other cuts would affect the trial court, prosecutor’s office, health department and several external agencies, including United Way.
But Eaton County Sheriff Tom Reich warned that slightly expanding some patrol services in Delta Township while cutting staffing in the county prosecutor’s office will lead to bottlenecking in the judicial system.
“We secured this contract to strengthen public safety, but if the rest of the justice system isn’t equipped to keep up, we will shift the crisis from patrol to courtroom,” Reich said.
County spokesperson Logan Bailey said commissioners are prioritizing protecting jobs wherever possible.
“Their top priority are county employees,” Bailey said. “So first, they cut the dollar amounts associated with open positions… Some, like the prosecuting attorney and trial courts, kept some of these positions open because they knew that if they filled them, there is a chance that the board would have to lay them off anyway come October 1.”
Bailey added that years of chronic underfunding have put pressure on the county’s ability to maintain infrastructure — and that situation will continue under the current budget proposal.
“ They had planned to allocate about a million dollars for capital improvements, which really isn't technically enough,” he said. “They removed that... We are not going to put any money towards infrastructure. It's zero at this point.”
The proposed cuts come after voters rejected a millage proposals in May and last November that county officials had hoped would close the budget gap — or at least keep funding for public safety services from the sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices.
County departments and agencies will have the chance to make their case for funding at the next budget meeting on June 27. Commissioners must approve the final budget by the end of September.
Produced with assistance from the Public Media Journalists Association Editor Corps funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.