Sheriff George Wilhelm and the county Board of Commissioners are finding themselves at
odds over the assignment of deputies for trash dumping enforcement. Wilhelm is requesting two new positions in
the 1999-2000 budget, claiming that he will need the jobs to replace deputies the county
wants to assign to enforcing trash violations.
County officials say they never
asked Wilhelm to make a reassignment, and are refusing to add the two new positions.
‘‘All we have ever asked
for is that if a call of an illegal dumping comes in, that a deputy come by,’’
Commissioner Dave Rowland said during Wednesday’s budget discussions. Rowland called
Wilhelm’s proposal to reassign two deputies to the task
‘‘ridiculous.’’
One of the positions Wilhelm is
proposing to reassign is now placed as a resource officer at South Rowan High School. The
other is a patrol officer. The positions were created in the early 1990s to enforce trash
dumping regulations, but they were reassigned by former Sheriff Bob Martin when the need
for the ‘‘trash troopers’’ subsided.
County Manager Tim Russell
maintains that when Wilhelm took office, ‘‘we made several calls for
help’’ to get enforcement of trash regulations from the Sheriff’s
Department.
‘‘The statement we
received was that ‘We do not have any deputies here that do environmental
work,’|’’ Russell maintained.
The county then sent Wilhelm a
letter identifying the positions – by position number – that the county had
created to enforce the trash rules.
Wilhelm says he read the memo as
an instruction to reassign the deputies. County officials say they were simply trying to
document to the new sheriff that the positions had been created for that purpose.
County officials say all they
wanted was to get deputies to respond to trash complaints; Wilhelm says his officers have
been responding to the complaints since he took office, and that he has records to prove
it.
In any event, the County Board did
not grant the new positions. But Wilhelm said he wonders about his relations with the
commissioners because of the critical remarks some made about his budget request. |
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