Rising costs at the Douglas County Jail have county commissioners calling for an audit — but not a financial one.

Commissioners say they want to consider hiring a consultant to conduct “performance” audits, studies intended to help identify structural shortcomings in government and suggest moves to make things work better.

Deciding whether the jail should remain part of the sheriff’s department or operate as a stand-alone agency could be the first of many subjects to be studied.

“We have accountants that look at our books and audit them from a purely fiscal standpoint,” said Charles Jones, commission chairman. “What we don’t have is a group that can look at performance: Are we doing the right thing? And are we doing the right thing effectively?

“That’s something that we want to think about.”

Commissioners are quick to point out they do not suspect any county department, agency or program of mismanagement. A series of performance audits simply would help ensure that the public’s money, an anticipated $47.5 million next year, was spent as efficiently and appropriately as possible.

“You make good government better,” Jones said.

Jail operations just happen to be among the first targets of commissioners’ candidates for an audit.

That’s because the entire sheriff’s department is poised to spend $8 million next year, up 9 percent from this year, continuing a string of budget increases that have commissioners concerned.

Locking down costs?

Next year, Sheriff Rick Trapp wants to hire three more corrections officers, revamp the jail’s work-release pod and add $100,000 to the overtime budget. The requests are part of his response to unexpected overcrowding in the $22 million jail, which opened less than five years ago.

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This year the sheriff’s department expects to spend $875,000 on overtime, $300,000 more than commissioners allocated a year ago. Nearly two-thirds of overtime costs are attributable to the jail, Trapp said, where plans are in the works to switch employees from eight-hour to 12-hour shifts in hopes of streamlining operations.

The department struggled to keep guards on the payroll, officials said, and one of the benefits afforded to corrections officers was that they have a chance to become patrol deputies after working shifts at the jail.

“We’re working our people to death,” Trapp told commissioners. “We’re working all kinds of uncontrolled overtime out there.”

While Jones doesn’t dispute the need for overtime, he wonders whether corrections officers might be paid less if they weren’t part of the sheriff’s department.

Taking the jail off Trapp’s list of responsibilities might lead to other savings, he said, while not sacrificing public safety.

“There are a lot of taxpayers who feel like we’re taxing them to death,” Jones told Trapp.

‘We can’t lose’

Commissioners tentatively have set aside $20,000 next year for consulting services.

Craig Weinaug, county administrator, said spending some of the money on a performance audit would be a worthwhile investment.

“Either the person’s going to find ways we could make the operation more efficient, or they’re going to say, ‘Hey, this is one of the most efficient operations we’ve ever seen,'” Weinaug said of his expectations from a consultant. “Either way we can’t lose. Either we get an outside perspective that our jail is being run extremely well, or we get ideas to make it better. How can that be bad?”

Such audits easily could expand to other areas of county government, he said. Commissioners have mentioned road maintenance as a likely target — to identify how many miles of road should be repaved each year to minimize maintenance costs in the years ahead, for example — but Weinaug could foresee going further.

“I think it would be a good idea to have somebody come in and experience the county as a citizen does,” he said. “Somebody who comes in cold and goes to the offices for the various services that we render, and then makes suggestions to us about how those services could have been better — and have people not know that this is the auditor coming in to check.

“I don’t see anything bad that could come out of that kind of process. That’s our responsibility: to continue to look for ways to do things better. That’s our job.”

Road work

Keith Browning, county engineer and director of public works, said his only concern about an audit would be the background and experience of the auditor. A certified public accountant might not be the best candidate to decide how many tons of asphalt pavement should be applied to a gravel roadbed with subsurface drainage issues.

But if the CPA also knows the road business, he said, bring it on.

“We’re a lean department, and we seem to have responsibilities added quite often, but we handle it,” said Browning, whose department maintains 202 miles of roads, 161 bridges and about a thousand drainage culverts. “I think Douglas County taxpayers are getting a good deal, but I’d certainly welcome any knowledgeable outside person who can provide us some assistance.

“Maybe we find out we should be doing more, and we should be putting more money into these departments — that we’re doing everything we can with our resources, and that we need more resources. I’d welcome that.”

Commissioners are ready to start searching for such answers. They intend to discuss audit options in the coming months before paying for information, expertise and impressions that could reaffirm or reshape portions of county government.

“We’ve had a lot of talk about the jail, about whether it should be a separate operation, and that’s the question today,” Jones said. “But two years ago it was another question. Three years from now it’ll be another question. Just periodically, you need to look at an organization and say, ‘Why are we doing that?’ We very seldom get to look at, ‘Are we doing the right thing? Should we eliminate a program? Should we start a new program?’ That’s what we want to have the capability to examine.”