By Bru Nimmons
Staff Reporter
bnimmons@thepccourier.com

PICKENS — With Pickens County Council set to vote on the third reading of its budget amendment on Monday night, Pickens County Sheriff Tommy Blankenship pressed council about a perceived inaction to allot more money within its budget for the needs of the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office.

“These men and women back here in green and tan see more trauma in a week than you will your whole life,” Blankenship said. “They deal with dead bodies, dead children. They deal with murderers and drug dealers. They deal with people that want to hurt you every day and they toe that blue line and they do it proud.”

Following Blankeship’s words and discussion among council, officials voted 5-0 to table its budget vote until its June 15 meeting, citing a desire to give the budget a deeper look amid concerns of widespread compensation issues throughout county offices.

 

Falling Behind

According to Blankenship, Pickens County is falling behind compared to other counties around the Upstate, including Greenville County, where Sheriff Hobart Lewis is currently looking to receive a $12,000 pay increase for his deputies.

“If (Lewis) gets this approved, which he looks like he’s going to, they’re going to be outpaying us by $27,000 a year,” Blankenship said. “Can you look at these men and women back here and tell me that a Greenville County deputy is worth more than they are? If so, I think you’re sitting in the wrong seat.”

Blankenship didn’t stop there, saying that the sheriff’s office is also getting outpaced by many of the municipalities within the county.

“I just heard that Central PD may be outpaying us in starting pay by $5,000 a year,” Blankenship said. “Central Police Department can pay their police officers more than Pickens County can pay their deputies.”

The sheriff said it is hard to ask deputies to weather the everyday stresses of law enforcement with the sheriff’s office “when they can do that same job in this county at a municipality with less of a workload for more money.”

Blankenship also lamented the county failing to budget any new law enforcement officers in recent years, saying the sheriff’s office had gone nine budget cycles without adding new officers.

Pickens County Council chairman Alex Saitta pushed back on the claims, citing yearly percentage increases that he found to be “above-average” compared to other areas of the budget.

“I go back and I look at the actual budgets, because that’s what you’re paid out of, those are real numbers,” Saitta said. “The budget to the sheriff’s department last year was up 10.3 percent. It was up 9 percent the year before that. This year it’s 6 percent. It’s not a 0 or a 1 or 2 percent — those are some pretty significant increases.”

Saitta also highlighted recent countywide pay increases after a compensation study.

While the sheriff’s office’s budget is determined by county council, Saitta pointed out that Blankenship has the ability to shift funds within that allotment toward what he sees fit.

“The sheriff’s budget is $21.3 million,” Saitta said. “He’s an elected official and he has the ability to move things within that budget the way he would like to.”

 

Cold Shoulder

Blankenship said that prior to the passing of the previous year’s budget, he had been told to schedule a meeting with Pickens County administrator Ken Roper about requests including additional staffing, new vests for deputies and a study on property owned by the county that could be used for the training of sheriff’s deputies.

Blankenship said despite numerous attempts to meet with Roper since that time, those meetings had not yet happened.

“Today, a year later, those meetings have yet to come, and not out of an attempt from me,” Blankenship said.

Roper voiced disagreement with Blankenship’s statement, saying he had met with Blankenship multiple times and describing the two sides’ inability to reach an agreement as “unfortunate.”

Saitta said that one reason he had failed to respond to Blankenship is due to strife over who should run the county’s dispatch center.

“One of the other problems is that the sheriff has hired an attorney and he’s threatening to sue the county over the dispatch,” Saitta said. “When they do that, our lawyers tell us to stop speaking, because that then gives us the liability.”

Saitta also believes that the county taking over the staffing of the new dispatch center will allow the sheriff’s office the flexibility to adjust part of its budgets to fit its needs.

“When we go over to the new dispatch center, county government is going to start taking calls for its agencies, EMS, fire and rescues, which are now taken in the sheriff’s department,” Saitta said. “Their call volume will drop 60 percent, and that’s going to free up resources in his department.”

Blankenship rebutted Saitta’s claims that he was planning to sue the county, while confirming that he had retained a lawyer to preserve the power of the sheriff’s office over dispatch.

“Mr. Saitta, you made an incorrect statement, and the truth needs to be revealed,” Blankenship said. “I am not suing for anything. I hired an attorney to protect the rights and the constitutional power of my office, which already has dispatch. Which, for an administration to take, I would have to sign over or go to referendum and let these people decide if they want Ken Roper to run the dispatch or if they want the sheriff to run the dispatch.”

 

Tabling the vote

Following Saitta’s comments, Councilman Chris Bowers pushed to table the budget vote until the council’s midmonth meeting on June 15, citing compensation concerns within the budget that were not limited to the sheriff’s office.

“Whether it be truck drivers, whether it be folks at the landfill, whether it be deputies, whether it be firemen, we’ve got to be able to have them,” Bowers said. “Without people, we won’t be able to have a county government.”

While Bowers maintained that no one wants to see their tax bill get higher, Pickens County might be due for an increase after continuing to avoid it for more than a decade.

“Nobody wants a tax increase, but if there is nowhere else in the budget to do it and it’s what’s needed to correct the problem, then we owe it to the citizens, the team members, to have that discussion,” he said.

Roper described the compensation issue as “pervasive countywide,” but said he did not believe it to be a problem that the county could fix in two weeks for its next meeting, as any solution presented would then create different problems.

“The sheriff and his employees are not wrong about this overarching problem,” Roper said. “It is the nature of what we have to balance in Pickens County with this tax base.”

Councilwoman Claiborne Linvill joined Bowers in support of tabling the vote, voicing her belief that more time to study on the compensation issues would be beneficial.

“It’s been weighing heavy on my mind,” Linvill said. “I think a couple weeks to work on that (would help), because we usually have a lot more budget meetings at the beginning of the year, so I think with a little more time I will support that.”