SALISBURY — While the approval of economic incentives for the expansion of Jabil into Rowan County was the hot-ticket item on the agenda for the Rowan County Board of Commissioners special meeting on Monday, the requested approval of extra-duty pay by the sheriff’s office may have spawned more discussion.

The request came from Chief Deputy Jason Owens, who asked for the pay to help the department cover state-required staffing amounts in the Rowan County Detention Center and county policy-mandated requirements for patrol officers.

The issue has arisen because the county had 22 vacancies between the two sides of the department as of Monday, said Owens. When those vacant positions are added to deputies taking vacation or sick days or officers who are performing their state-mandated training, Owens said the county often needs to ask deputies to work outside of their regular duty hours.

Originally, the sheriff’s office considered requesting the approval of extra-duty pay for six months, but were asked to make the requests on a monthly basis earlier in 2025.

“I’ll split (the vacancies) down the middle, and it’s about 10 or 11 short on the detention side and about 10 or 11 short on what I call the criminal side, which is everything else. We have applicants in the process every day, but it takes months to get somebody hired. It does not happen in a couple of weeks,” said Owens.

In essence, the sheriff’s office request would extend extra-duty pay to lieutenants, who are currently not allowed to collect it, and allow for the time-and-a-half wages to be extended to those who use their sick or vacation days during the same 28-day pay period. Without the approval, a deputy who takes a vacation day and then covers another shift would not receive overtime.

“This overtime would allow for folks who are not scheduled to work, in other words it’s their day off and they will be able to sign up to go to work a shift for another squad when they’re short. That allows us to do that. Otherwise, I don’t know what we would do. If you force people to go to work (on their day off), they’re going to quit,” said Owens.

Owens noted that the department is already budgeted for those 22 positions, so they should be able to pull the overtime pay from the unspent salaries.

The issue for several of the county commissioners were that the sheriff’s office is asking for a privilege that other departments are not allowed, but could request, and that the effort is “applying a band-aid” to the larger problem of staffing, as Chairman Greg Edds said.

“I don’t know if anyone is crazy about this, only because it’s a band-aid. We set ourselves up for this, we asked for (it to come back every month), like you said. We need a long-term solution. Because of the timing, I’m willing to do it for this month, but we need to sit down with you and the sheriff and see what everybody else is doing, what’s our liability across the county,” said Edds.

Edds asked County Attorney Jay Dees if the county would be liable to paying similar extra pay for every department if the request was approved. Dees noted that he and the county’s human relations department did not see it as a legal liability due to both the emergency nature of the request along with the sheriff’s office being different from other departments, with minimum staffing requirements and a different pay schedule.

Craig Pierce opposed the request, which he said stemmed from a couple points, with the main one being that he did not want to go above and beyond what had already been budgeted, noting that the money is there for salaries. Pierce did agree that the request was necessary for the detention center due to the state’s minimum requirements.

“My concern is, I don’t want to open this thing up and all of a sudden everybody’s doing overtime and next thing you know we’ve got 21 other departments saying, ‘well, why ain’t I getting paid overtime?’ If the jail is the one that has the requirement, I’m OK with doing it for the jail.”

Throughout the discussion, each of the commissioners stated that they viewed the request as a short-term solution to the long-term problem of staffing in the sheriff’s office, with interim Commissioner Daniel Lancaster saying that the county should consider creative options to help the issue.

“This is a short-term band-aid. We probably want to see something different that is going to help us long term,” said Lancaster. “This incentive is only going to be an incentive for people for a little while, before they get tired of even that. And I know hiring people is what everybody says is going to be the big change or fix, but there may be other things, maybe not (as many) special teams or special activities so we can keep these guys rested so we can take care of the minimum things we need to do before we do extra stuff.”

The request was passed three to one, with Edds, Vice-Chairman Jim Greene and Lancaster voting yes and Craig Pierce voting no. Judy Klusman was absent from the meeting.