JSO will absorb workers' comp costs into budget

City council’s finance committee met Tuesday for its weekly meeting but the elephant in the room was the unpaid workers comp claims that have been a thorn in the side of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office since they found out they might be held accountable for paying up.  Sheriff John Rutherford even threatened to close the city's Community Transition Center, which houses a widely-acclaimed drug treatment program, and to lay off over a hundred more officers on the street.

At Tuesday's meeting, Undersheriff Dwain Senterfitt told council JSO should be able to absorb the $3.7 million in outstanding claims into its budget, so long as the city’s total budget ends up in the green when the fiscal year ends on September 30.  He says they took as much more as they could out of the budget to find the extra savings.

"We monitored overtime, we monitored our pharmacy costs in the jails...just everything," said Senterfitt, who was at odds with the committee over whether JSO should be allowed to spend its own savings.

"Councilman Crescembini and I obviously disagreed up there.  He said that by giving me the money I was taking it from somebody else, and I have to disagree with that.  That's money we saved in our budget.  There were some revenue shortfalls, but those weren't in the sheriff's budget."

Finance committee chair and councilman John Crescembini says other departments like the library, public works, JFRD, and even city council had come up with savings in their budgets, and all that money was swept up by the city to fill budget holes elsewhere, including at JSO.  Two weeks ago city council voted to give JSO the $10.5 million it had come up with in savings instead of using that money for the unpaid workers' comp claims.  Councilman Crescembini, however, was not one of the "yea's."

"I thought that we should have pro-rated those savings among all the departments," said Crescembini.  "I mean, how am I going to get the fire department next year to save money if what they save gets taken away at the end of the year and gets given to another part of city government.  I think we've destroyed any internal incentive to continue to save...the fire departments saved $6.5 million but we swept their money to give it to the sheriff."

Senterfitt says he wants to make it clear that it has been a difficult budget year for JSO as well as every other city agency.

"One thing I want to point out is that people keep saying that the sheriff is getting everything he wants...last year we cut $17.7 million and laid off a lot of people.  This year...we're still cutting 74 police positions.  We're cutting 22 corrections positions.  We're cutting 154 civilian positions.  We haven't gotten everything."

Council auditor Kirk Sherman told council members his projections indicated that the city would, indeed, be okay come the end of the fiscal year, but to remember that budgets are fluid.

City council votes final on the city's budget at its next full meeting on September 25.