President’s Message… It seems that the weeks, months and holidays have swiftly gone by and I wonder how the time has moved on so quickly. It seemed just yesterday that we were celebrating the holidays and ringing in the new year for 2008. Somehow in the blink of an eye, we moved from January 1st to the beginning of the month of March. Whether we are ready or not; time is moving on without us and we had better be prepared to move along with the new year as time does not stand still for any one person.
Much of my focus of late has been on budget issues as I am sure is the case with many detention administrators across the state. We are preparing the fiscal budget for 2009 and tightening our belts in the current year to stretch funds to get us through to June 30th. Many similar issues that we struggle with in next year’s budget is the pressure to increase revenues, increasing salaries for additional positions to provide adequate staffing, increasing operational lines for training, equipment, uniforms and even capital projects for construction of new facilities or continued building maintenance and repairs. The same question still arises as we focus on managing detention facilities as being an operation or a business? Unfortunately, it is a little of both as we do our best to be good stewards of county resources, while managing an efficient facility and generating enough revenue to sustain an ever increasing operational cost. [read more]