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SMITH COUNTY — At their budget workshop for the 2025 fiscal year on Wednesday, the Smith County Commissioner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Office having to go over budget on overtime because of a need for additional staffing at the Smith County Jail and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Each year, knowing what we spent the year before, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve found less and less overtime,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Smith County Sheriff Larry Smith said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
At the workshop, Smith presented data that showed how the sheriff\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n
Smith blamed the increasing jail population for the sheriff\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s office\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s growing manpower need and proposed that money spent on overtime could help hire new staff instead.<\/p>\n
The commissioner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s court\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s proposed budget for 2025 had reportedly proposed six new staff but Smith claimed that six new staff would provide little relief.<\/p>\n
Under Smith\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s proposal, $750,000 from proposed budgeted overtime could be relocated to create positions for 4 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153low-risk area\u00e2\u20ac\u009d detention officers, 4 central jail detention officers and 2 tower watch detention officers.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153I think we should get the opportunity to get those ten positions by cutting the overtime in half with no fiscal impact to the budget,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Smith said. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Overtime 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.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Smith County Judge Neal Franklin said the court\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intention is to move forward with the 10 new officers. He added that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve also decided to not accept a proposal for another administrative assistant for a sheriff\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s office detective handling records for over 500 convicted sex offenders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SMITH COUNTY — At their budget workshop for the 2025 fiscal year on Wednesday, the Smith County Commissioner\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Office having to go over budget on overtime … Continue reading County intends to hire 10 new detention officers<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":1345889,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/wp-content\/media\/2024\/08\/smith-county-sheriff-201x200.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[177],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1345887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news-archive-archives"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-07 14:44:53","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/wp-content\/media\/2024\/08\/smith-county-sheriff-201x200.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1345887"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1345892,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345887\/revisions\/1345892"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1345889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1345887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1345887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1345887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}