Asotin County taxpayers may be presented with a pared-down version of the new sheriff’s office they turned down last month.
Neil Ausman, chairman of the county commission, said Wednesday the board is considering asking the voters to approve a $275,000 bond issue to build a sheriff’s office approximately two-thirds the size originally proposed.
But Sheriff Herbert C. Reeves said that if the board does take the reduced proposals to the polls, he will urge that it be rejected.
Voters approved a $400,000 bond issue by 56.3 percent margin Nov. 3, just 37 percent short of the 60 percent required by state law.
The sheriff’s office would have been built in conjunction with a new jail, mandated by the state legislature which has provided $1.4 million in construction funds. Maintenance and operations costs would fall back on the county, however, and Reeves and the commissioners have agreed from the beginning that the sheriff’s department staff would have to serve double duty to make the plan work.
Ausman told the Clarkston Chamber of Commerce board of directors Wednesday that he doesn’t feel the original proposal was out of line, or that it contained any frills. “It was so close to passing, I feel this is a compromise that maybe the people can afford,” he said.
The new plan cuts about 1,000 square feet of floor space out of the sheriff’s office. “It’s more of a make-do thing,” he conceded, but said he believes it would get the county by for several years, especially if some operations are combined with the Clarkston Police Department.
Reeves, however, maintained later Wednesday that the commissioners have no idea what it takes to run a police department.
Reeves said the first time he was shown the revised plan was at Monday’s commission meeting, long after the commissioners had met with architects and discussed areas that could be cut.
The new plan eliminates four rooms, including an office for a duty sergeant, two investigative interview rooms and a space plan-hed for future development of a computerized records systems. It also cuts back on the size of other rooms and doesn’t provide evidence locker space, he said.
The commissioners expect interviews to be conducted in one large room divided only by curtains, which could mean officers would have to continue to travel to Clarkston when prisoners or suspects had to be separated for questioning, he said.
Reeves said the original requests he presented to the architects were “very conservative.”
The department is “already in an inadequate building and I can’t see the economy of building another inadequate facility that does not meet my specifications,” he said.
“I will not support asking the taxpayers for tax money to build an inadequate department that would have to be remodeled and enlarged from the day it’s opened. I will not be a party to that and I will urge the people not to support that.”
Ausman agreed that there is no room for growth in the reduced version, but said the commission is “trying to respond to what the people were trying to tell us.”
The architects also revised some of their figures because of the depressed building economy to get the price down by $125,000, he said. The estimated construction cost of $75 a square foot is now closer to $60, and the inflation factor has been reduced from 18 percent to 10 percent, Ausman said.
The commissioners will discuss the proposal Monday in an attempt to get it on the Feb. 2 ballot with levies being run by the Asotin and Clarkston school districts, he said. The combined balloting will save the taxpayers some $6,000, he estimated.
This story was published in the Dec. 10, 1981, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.
