GREELEY, Colo. — The Weld County Sheriff's Office has reached its breaking point after facing staffing shortages at the Weld County Jail.
They're temporarily suspending some services like Animal Control. Calls for help will be answered on a case by case basis. As of now, some calls for help will be taken care of over the phone, and others may be referred to the online reporting system. The Weld County Sheriff's Office will consider how severe the crime is and respond based on the resources available.
“It’s not a comfortable change internally, nor is it a comfortable change externally for our community,” said Captain Matt Turner with the Weld County Sheriff’s Office.
“It’s required a ton of overtime,” Turner said. “That's time that they’re not with their families, it’s time that they're not resting and recuperating so they come back to work fresh.”
Turner said short staffing, mandatory overtime, and recruiting have been a consistent problem for a couple of years. They announced their solution on Monday.
“We are reallocating some of our staff from some other areas in our office to work in the jail,” Turner said.
“I think the biggest impact people of Weld County will feel are slower response times,” he said.
Those deputies will be shifted to staff the jail. Sheriff Steve Reams said keeping the jail operational is his number one responsibility, and other ideas to fix the problem haven't worked.
“Any other options were going to be shortcuts that we were not comfortable with,” Turner said.
County commissioners were surprised to hear about the changes this week.
“Quite frankly, we were caught a little bit off guard. The sheriff had made some budget requests a few weeks ago and we met with him on Monday and actually granted him raises and step increases,” said Kevin Ross, the chairman of the board of county commissioners.
Commissioners dipped into reserves to give the office $650,000.
“Quite a chunk of money, that's nothing to scoff at,” Turner said.
“The board of commissioners has always solemnly supported our law enforcement and we continue to do that for Sheriff Reams and the men and women over in our sheriff’s department and this is no different,” Ross said.
Still, a move like this is rare.
“These are typically things we don’t do,” Ross said. “This is a huge commitment though for us, as our budgets were set and we had to go into reserves for this to try and help him out, but we know it’s that important and that’s our commitment.”
“But regardless of what we we're given, we are at a critical stage, so a change is still necessary until we can get stable,” Turner said.
The problems with staffing inside the jail will be felt outside the jail in the coming weeks.
“We are going to start phasing that in,” Turner said. “So while we haven't seen a change to our operation yet, it is looming.”
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