County intends to hire 10 new detention officers

SMITH COUNTY — At their budget workshop for the 2025 fiscal year on Wednesday, the Smith County Commissioner’s Court verbally agreed to add 10 new detention officer jobs in the county. According to our news partner KETK, the move comes after years of the Smith County Sheriff’s Office having to go over budget on overtime because of a need for additional staffing at the Smith County Jail and elsewhere.

“Each year, knowing what we spent the year before, we’ve found less and less overtime,” Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith said. “The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”

At the workshop, Smith presented data that showed how the sheriff’s office reportedly had $300,000 budgeted for overtime and ended up spending $1,019,020 in 2020. Similarly, in 2021, they had even more overtime budgeted with $450,000 and they ended up spending $1,525,436.

Smith blamed the increasing jail population for the sheriff’s office’s growing manpower need and proposed that money spent on overtime could help hire new staff instead.

The commissioner’s court’s proposed budget for 2025 had reportedly proposed six new staff but Smith claimed that six new staff would provide little relief.

Under Smith’s proposal, $750,000 from proposed budgeted overtime could be relocated to create positions for 4 “low-risk area” detention officers, 4 central jail detention officers and 2 tower watch detention officers.

“I think we should get the opportunity to get those ten positions by cutting the overtime in half with no fiscal impact to the budget,” Smith said. “Overtime helped for a while, but if we tell people that they have to mandatorily work it and all that. That only works for a while.”

Smith County Judge Neal Franklin said the court’s intention is to move forward with the 10 new officers. He added that they’ve also decided to not accept a proposal for another administrative assistant for a sheriff’s office detective handling records for over 500 convicted sex offenders.