Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office faces scrutiny over $7M budget gap

Clackamas County

Sheriff Angela Brandenburg faced pointed questions from county board members last week after she revealed that her office was on track to significantly overspend its budget and requested a $7.7 million bailout.

Brandenburg

told the county’s budget committee, which includes the five-member Board of Commissioners and five county residents, that she was following the board’s directive to hire more staff this year even though she said her budget was “knowingly underfunded.” By doing so, she said her office is now in a position where it will likely incur more costs than it can cover with its over $146 million budget, an outcome she said the board should have expected.

The office has hired 15 employees in the past year, 13 of whom were brought on to work inside the county’s new courthouse, county spokesperson Scott Anderson said. The sheriff’s office has 607 full-time employees.

“My budget has been underfunded and I was told to hire,” Brandenburg said. “It’s not a surprise that we find ourselves here.”

The explanation drew the ire of board members. The committee initially balked at Brandenburg’s request. But after hours of deliberations, it agreed to recommend providing $6.5 million to backfill the shortfall. That would still leave the sheriff’s office short of its expected expenses, officials said, which could prompt it to furlough temporary workers and pause hiring.

“My understanding was that you’d hire within the money that you had, and that doesn’t seem to be what’s been happening here to me,” Commissioner Martha Schrader said. “Why is there a shortfall? We did tell you to hire, but you were supposed to hire within what you had.”

Brandenburg told The Oregonian/OregonLive in a statement that she warned the budget committee last year that the proposed budget would not cover costs for things like jail medical care and increasing personnel costs. She said County Administrator Gary Schmidt advised her to submit a “deficit budget” and ask for the money later.

Brandenburg first warned the board that she planned to request the additional funds in February. The sheriff’s office has used a similar process in the past, officials said.

“The projected shortfall isn’t due to overspending,” she said in a statement. “It’s because the budget was knowingly underfunded from the start.”

The law enforcement agency’s budget gap became the focal point of discussions meant to be centered on the broader 2026 fiscal year budget. The county is working to finalize that $2 billion fiscal plan.

Schmidt’s proposed budget recommended a roughly 11% general fund increase for the Sheriff’s Office in the next fiscal year, bringing its total proposed budget to over $155 million. Schmidt’s proposal included a 4% increase in general fund money year over year for most other departments, officials said.

However, the budget committee shot down that 11% increase last week, instead proposing that the Sheriff’s Office get a boost of 4%, like other departments. The department had a general fund budget of $78.2 million this year, according to amended budget numbers in Schmidt’s proposed budget.

Brandenburg’s office has two main sources of funding. The first comes from the county’s general fund — its largest pot of discretionary dollars. The second is from the county’s public safety levy, funded through a property tax.

Commissioners Paul Savas and Ben West questioned why Brandenburg hadn’t used levy funds allotted for personnel to hire deputies. The levy is supposed to provide funding for 86 “sworn positions,” records show. The levy accounts for nearly $32 million of the sheriff’s budget this year, or about 22%, according to the amended budget figures.

“With how this conversation is going, I am a no vote,” West said last week. “It’s so frustrating because we have a deputy over here in the general fund and a deputy that could be in the levy fund, and we decide that we’re going to keep it in general. We could relieve and mitigate this issue for everybody — yourselves and the taxpayers — and just shift (that cost) over to the (levy).”

But Brandenburg said her office’s projections show the five-year levy could run dry before its expiration in 2027 because it did not account for the increasing costs of personnel. She said she worried that filling the positions the levy promised to fill would result in a shortfall in the levy down the road. The county’s projections show that the levy funds will not run out early, budget officials said.

The budget committee spent hours deliberating before finally voting 8-2 to recommend that the board provide $6.5 million to the Sheriff’s Office’s current budget. West and newly appointed Commissioner Diana Helm voted no.

Brandenburg said her office’s projected shortfall sits at $7.1 million for this year, meaning that additional recommended funding would fall short of closing the gap. Sheriff’s spokesperson John Wildhaber said the shortfall would force the office to place temporary workers on reduced hours or furlough, pause hiring for general fund positions for 30 days and freeze training expenses.

The board will vote on whether to approve the additional funding June 26.

As a stipulation to that funding, the committee recommended that the county’s finance department provide monthly reports to the board on spending in the Sheriff’s Office.

County Chair Craig Roberts remained mostly silent during the deliberations . He served as sheriff from 2005 through 2020, and said during a budget meeting that he understood the difficult position Brandenburg is in. He said he supported closing the budget gap this year with the expectation that the sheriff will work within the budget she is given in fiscal year 2026.

“When we come back here at the end of the year, it will be upon the sheriff’s responsibility to be meeting that,” Roberts said in the meeting.

The Board of Commissioners will vote to adopt the 2026 fiscal year budget, which unlike neighboring counties does not include heavy cuts, June 18.

— Austin De Dios covers Multnomah County politics, programs and more. Reach him at 503-319-9744,


adedios@oregonian.com


or @AustinDeDios.

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