SALISBURY — The Rowan County Sheriff’s Office received more than $700,000 in grant funding from the state and Sheriff Travis Allen took the opportunity to share with the county commissioners and the public about what the funding will be used for during the Rowan County Board of Commissioners meeting on Tuesday.

Some of the funding will be used for equipment in schools to assist with shooting responses and a boat for patrolling High Rock Lake, among other uses.

The $720,000 directed grant was given to the sheriff’s office as part of North Carolina’s 2023 Appropriations Act, which was passed into law in October. The act states that the funding was given to the sheriff’s office to “purchase or upgrade vehicles and equipment and for related training for the sheriff’s office.”

Allen said that his office plans to use the funding for upgrades to the boats for a High Rock Lake marine unit, to buy four motorcycles, improve school safety equipment, multiple mobile camera towers and a storage facility for vehicles owned by the sheriff’s office or being held as evidence.

For school safety equipment, Allen said that his requests to the state legislature were fueled by lessons learned by law enforcement who responded to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

“We felt that the excuses used in the Texas shooting in the schools were they didn’t have any tools to get in the doors and they didn’t have ballistic shields. So we want to provide a ballistics shield and entry tool to every school in the county, private and public and including the local colleges, with this money,” said Allen.

Allen also noted that local law enforcement has talked to experts who reviewed the responses in Texas and learned that during the process of law enforcement entering the schools, students and staff that had been wounded were bleeding out. To prevent that from happening in Rowan County, Allen said that the sheriff’s office wants to place a tourniquet in every classroom. He also said that his office is working with the schools’ administrations to coordinate the placement and use of the equipment that he plans to place in schools.

With the purchase of four motorcycles, Allen said that the sheriff’s office hopes to add a dedicated motorcycle division that will assist with escorting parades and funeral motorcades.

“One of the major reasons that we believe we received that is we have two very large national cemeteries here and we do a lot of escorts for funerals, and those will be highly beneficial for that,” said Allen.

Since High Rock Lake is the second largest lake in North Carolina by shore footage, Allen said that the sheriff’s office will also be using the funding to purchase a 23-foot scout boat, which would be used to patrol the lake. He said that with the lake serving as a large part of the economic growth of the county, the sheriff’s office wanted to make certain that they would maintain a strong presence in enforcement there.

The camera towers that Allen is looking into would be similar to the towers that the Salisbury Police Department currently uses throughout the city. Allen said that the towers the county would purchase would be used in the same way, being placed in locations throughout the county that are dealing with increases of property crimes such as car or building break-ins.

The vehicle storage facility that the sheriff’s office wants to add would allow for vehicles being stored as evidence as well as newer vehicles such as the scout boat to be stored in a secure location. Currently, the sheriff’s office shares a gravel lot with the parks and recreation department and the EMS division of the emergency services department. The lot Allen wants to create would be placed beside the jail annex and would cost around $100,000.

“We’re borrowing an EMS bay right now for the Bearcat (armored vehicle). We really don’t have a good place to store our boats or any of our other equipment. The light towers, all those things that we’ll purchase, we really have nowhere to put those,” said Allen.

Allen also told the commissioners at the meeting that the sheriff’s office is looking into the possibility of housing federal inmates in order to increase the revenue that the department receives. After the discussion, the commissioners voted unanimously to accept the grant money and disburse it to the sheriff’s office.