The Operational Safety Millage is nothing about building or maintenance at Wesley street or Chanter Road. Jackson County Sheriff Gary Schuette said it’s about keeping deputies on patrol.
“All the controversy I didn’t understand a lot of it I thought we answered most of those questions but all of the controversy concerning whether or not we should build a new jail or how that new jail should be funded really doesn’t enter into the equation in this millage. Frankly this millage is just about the deputies that keep people safe and that’s what people need to understand. This is about the deputies that keep you safe and keeping them out there doing their jobs, yeah it’s nothing about Wesley Street or broken pipe a lot of people get confused too because it’ll say on the ballot a jail operations millage well how does that affect Patrol well it comes from the same bucket of money if you will.”
Some rumblings a little while back at the County Tower Building regarding County Commission support for the new jail. Sheriff Schuette said he doesn’t have time for any of that and it was likely mischaracterized.
“Discord is the right word but between the sheriff’s department in the County Commission does that exists is that a figment that you might not be getting the support you need from the County Commission?”
“Well the thing right now is no I don’t think that’s exactly accurate. I think what we need to do right now is is band together to make sure that the citizens are getting what they need. I’m not so sure that the getting involved in some sort of in-fight or anything like that is going to be advantageous for either myself or the County Commission. The fact of the matter remains that they hold the purse strings and I run the facility. It doesn’t serve either one of us to be at odds about issues like this we need to be on the same page and frankly they’ve tried with the other two millages to to get them passed and then this one they put up on the ballot again because they understand the importance of trying to get a measure like this to pass.”
The Sheriff’s final message from last week said this is about safety.
“I think the final message is that this is about your safety and what does that mean to you and that is not an overstatement of what we’re looking at here today. I would invite them to look at our shift activity reports and I’ll help them to decipher them just a little bit. When you see a situation on a shift activity report this seems kind of Jermaine not really a big deal so suspicious circumstance a disorderly subject whatever the case may be that’s deputies responding to somebody who’s seeing or hearing something in the middle of the night. You’ll next see something like a field contact you’ll see a person that was arrested these are situations where those subjects were either involved in a crime or about to be involved in a crime and the deputies were able to stop it.”
