03-24-2026 Council [40:11-45:11]

Transport, one touch base, we had 581 total transports, they drove over 41,000 miles. Of those 581 transports, 280 of those were here to court, and the thing that I want to point out there is that's not as easy as they just don't pick up an inmate drive over there, and then it takes more than five minutes. I mean, a lot of times they're taking each one of those transports, they may take between six and ten inmates over there, and then they're setting in court for four plus hours. So it may be only one transport, but it's taking up four more hours to do that, so those guys do really, really busy, and I kind of broke down if you have any questions on that, all the different transports and things. For security, I think this is a pretty big number. They screened a total of 78,113 people between the plaza and the courthouse over 78,000 people, and of that, they actually see 771 weapons, so when people talk about court security, not being necessary, four guns, 600 and some knives, pepper spray, and then other sharp objects and things. And then they also arrested 61, 61 people, so they do more than just stand there at the door. They're providing a lot of safety for all of our employees, so. Civil process, we served just over 3,000, 3,120 civil processes, and then the Sex and Violent Fender Registry, I think a lot of people are probably shocked by this, but we actually have 148 offenders that have to register in the county. 18 of those are in a jail, somewhere in Indiana, so we have 130 active ones that we are monitoring. And of those 130, 72 of them have to come in and do yearly reporting to us, 56 have to do it every 90 days, and then we have two that have to come in every seven days. And then we have to check, not only do they come in and do their thing, they have to also update every time they change vehicles, or if they change their jobs, or any of that stuff, so they have the normal requirements that they have to come in, and then every time there's a change, they also have to come in and update that new cell phone, anything like that. And then we have to verify their residency that they sign up for, and we did 312 residency verifications last year, so the yearly ones we do once a year, but if they're 90 day reporting, we go confirm their residency every 90 days. So, and we, in 2025, we filed charges on 11 different offenders who violated the terms of the registry, and we've actually already filed on seven so far in 2026, so we're keeping a pretty close eye on that stuff, so. Going through, I don't know if anybody had any questions on the staffing aspect of things that was pretty self-explanatory. Some of the, one thing I will point out, I mentioned this last time, and it's because Janie likes statistics and looking things up, and I mentioned this at the last special meeting, but just as a reminder, Lawrence County ranks 20th in total area, 33rd in population, 54th in assessed value in the state, but our deputies are ranked 80th out of 92, so just own that out there, so we remember that, come budget time. And speaking of budget, some budget highlights, once again in 2025, we did not, we did not ask for any additional at all over what was, what was budgeted, anything we had with any additional that we asked was actually the self-generated fund, and we just needed to take it out of there and put it into the, to the budget line. We brought in just over 127,000 for housing department of corrections inmates, and we generated almost 300,000 through our commissary account, which is the sale of snacks, food, electronic cigarettes, Rick, that's a big one, and as well as our phone communications and things like that. And then we spent $293,000 from commissary, portraying equipment, uniform software, and then putting things back into the jail, as far as the programs and different things like that. In 2025, we did a budget reduction of $319,000 back to the county. In 2026, we also reduced the county budget by $290,000 by giving up four total positions that's in salary and benefit, so another $290,000 of savings. And our 2026 budget is actually more than $600,000 less than my 2023 budget was when I first took over a share of, so over a half a million dollars less budgeted than what we had.