Deschutes County budget panel mulls DA’s big request

Deschutes County commissioners and citizen budget panel members are weighing how much funding to give to the district attorney’s office for the upcoming fiscal year, amid a big request for more staff totaling some $1.3 million.

It was a heated discussion at times on Wednesday afternoon as District Attorney John Hummel plead his case to the six-member budget committee, including the three county commissioners.

Hummel is asking for 12 more staff members to keep up with the increase in cases the county is seeing.

According to data put together by Hummel’s office, Deschutes County saw 1,000 more cases in 2018 than the previous year.

That data also showed that 42 percent of his staff left for one reason or another in the past year, which Hummel said is due to the stress of being overworked in his office.

Hummel has previously stated that if he does not get his funding, he will be forced to make some tough decisions that could lead to cuts, such as not prosecuting misdemeanor crimes, as well as cutbacks to victim services.

“Their job is to decide how much money to allocate to my department. My job is, once they make that decision, I decide how best to use that money to maximize public safety,” Hummel said. “So after their decision, well, if they approve all of my positions that I requested, well then we go on as we are now. If they approve (fewer) positions than I requested, then (!) and my management team will sit down and decide how best to allocate that and see if we have to do service reductions.”

The budget committee and commissioners pushed Hummel to prioritize what he needs most from the staff he would like to hire.

But Hummel didn’t back down from his original stance, saying all staffing needs are equally important to making sure he can adequately protect the county.

Commissioners Tony DeBone and Phil Henderson said they are still weighing how they would like to move forward with the budget.

“I do support that we are going to provide them some resources, in the facility and probably some more staffing,” DeBone said. “But yeah, the big vision that was given to us, I don’t know that we are going to go all the way,”

Henderson added, “I personally will probably support some of the additional funding. I do think that there are some things that have changed a little bit in our county from over the last several years.”

The next steps are for the budget committee to finish allocating money for the budget, and the hope is to get the budget firmed up by Friday.

Then it will go in front of county commissioners for final approval at an upcoming meeting.