Fund jail staff or do not pass go

Bob Norris and Bill Brooks have presented an opportunity for all of us to come together on an important issue.

Public safety.

Kootenai County’s sheriff is dealing with a serious threat not just to inmates and staff at Kootenai County’s jail, but to the general public as well.

In a major shift over the past few years, our jail has gone from heavy on misdemeanors to heavy on felonies. More serious criminals are filling those cells these days, and Norris’s problem — our entire community’s problem — is adequately staffing the jail.

The drum that’s already been beaten ad nauseum is that the sheriff’s office (and every other office) doesn’t pay enough to keep good employees. But unlike the problems most other employers face, having insufficient numbers of trained, alert detention staff poses great risk to the public.

Because of too few staff, many are required to work overtime. A little OT is a good thing, padding otherwise skimpy paychecks. But being forced to work 20 or more hours overtime, week after week, month after month? Staff get burned out. They want time with their loved ones. They want a life, especially after so many hours watching over society’s problem children.

Maybe you’ve noticed that the jail property is a neighbor to Coeur d’Alene High School and Kootenai County Fairgrounds. We dread the possibility of some really bad people escaping during school hours or in the midst of the fair or other major fairground attractions.

Solving this problem or even making significant headway won’t be easy, politically or financially. The county budget, overseen by Commissioners Brooks, Chris Fillios and Leslie Duncan, is going to have to be stretched to meet this critical need. And it should be done before tragedy awakens the community to strong support.

Rather than wait for this year’s elections or even the budget process for Fiscal Year 2023 to get going, we urge all three commissioners to make it their highest priority to find money, now, to significantly increase the pay of jail detention staff. With roughly a third of the jail staff missing or in training, the situation constitutes an emergency and should be treated as such.

Just Monday night, when the sheriff's office sent out three urgent requests for all available deputies to respond to a lethal shooting and structures on fire, only two deputies responded. The others? Filling in at the jail or flat-out exhausted.

A unanimous vote for immediate jail staff relief will send the loudest possible message to constituents that keeping this incredible community safe is commissioners’ greatest concern.

“I told you so” down the road is not an acceptable option.