Henry County Sheriff Ric McCorkle was given the floor during a recent special meeting of the county council and commissioners.
McCorkle emphasized over and over that his road deputies and jail officers aren’t getting paid enough for the job they do every day.
The sheriff said it feels like law enforcement is “the illegitimate child at the family gathering – if we’re being nice.”
He said Henry County’s deputies are paid third in the county, behind New Castle police and Indiana State troopers. And they have lower starting salaries than their counterparts at the Knightstown Police Department.
On top of that, Henry County officers run the jail, where inmates from all over the county are housed.
“It’s tough when you’re third. When you’ve got twice as much to cover, and you’ve got that much more responsibility,” McCorkle told the commissioners and council members. “It makes it difficult to keep people.”
He was also frustrated that Henry County spends time and money on job classification and salary studies “and we never go with it!”
“Why not? What does it take?” he asked the council.
McCorkle asked for clarification on the $9.2 million that Henry County is getting for Covid-19 relief. He said the rules keep changing and wanted to know if that money could be used for raises in his department.
Councilman Chad Malicoat explained the funds can maybe be used to give a bonus to first-line responders who worked during the pandemic.
Councilman Kenon Gray said the one-time stipend could not be figured into the county’s annual budget.
“We can never use that to pay salaries because we don’t have any guarantee that that money will be back tomorrow,” Malicoat told Sheriff McCorkle. “I don’t anticipate the federal government sending us any more money.”
The concern from the council was that McCorkle or other department heads would have to turn around and cut pay in a couple years if they were depending on those emergency funds for regular wages.
Public Safety Income Tax
Councilman Clay Morgan said the sheriff’s department might not be in this situation today if the county’s Public Safety Local Income Tax (LIT) was still being used the way it was originally designed.
(Editor’s note: When it was first created, this was called a “local option income tax” or LOIT. The name later became “local income tax” (LIT). Officials used the two names interchangeably.)
The previous county council – most of whom were voted out of office in 2017 – told taxpayers the money would be used “to build up and bolster public safety,” Morgan said.
The LIT generates more than $1 million each year for public safety. The Dept. of Local Government Finance projects Henry County will get $1.3 million this year from it.
“If it was used properly and for its intended purposes... we [might] not have the problems in Sheriff’s Department right now,” he said at the July 15 work session.
Morgan said the previous county council repurposed the LIT tax revenue soon after the money started rolling in.
Rather than creating a emergency savings account for the sheriff and other law enforcement agencies or fire departments in Henry County, the money was redirected to pay for the daily operations of the Sheriff’s Department.
Morgan voted against the change. Councilman Harold Griffin, a former sheriff, abstained from the vote on that budget.
“We’re now funded by Safety LIT and everything we received in our budget before, in the regular budget, went to other things,” McCorkle said.
“Now we’re no better off,” Morgan said.
McCorkle told the council he would look into more creative ways to raise revenue for his workers.
One option is to start charging for funeral escorts around the county, rather than continuing to provide that as a free service. The sheriff’s department could also start charging for repeat false alarms at residences.
“But is that fair to the voting public?” McCorkle asked. “Is it fair to you or me?”
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