T-L Photo/ROBERT A. DEFRANK Belmont County Sheriff David Lucas, left, and Fiscal Officer Kitty Paboucek discuss expenses as commissioners review the department’s proposed budget.

ST. CLAIRSVILLE — Belmont County’s 2024 budget is taking shape, and the commissioners have been holding regular budget hearings in the final quarter of 2023.

The largest segment of the budget traditionally goes to the sheriff’s office. Sheriff David Lucas and Fiscal Officer Kitty Paboucek outlined next year’s projected expenses during their hearing.

Paboucek said the sheriff’s office is asking for $9.2 million, adding it is a comparable amount to this year.

One priority is the purchase of six new cruisers at about $55,000 each. Lucas said optimally, cars should be rotated out every four years.

Beyond this, Paboucek said the largest expenses are related to food, fuel and medical expenses.

They elaborated after the meeting.

“We don’t have a deadline, it’s just that they’re hard to come by,” Paboucek said of the cruisers.

Lucas added there was a shortage of parts in 2022 and that 200 agencies in Ohio including his had their orders canceled.

“That’s why we need to get our cars in, so we can secure our spot on the orders,” he said.

Paboucek said the office would like to have a decision this month in order to get the order placed.

She added that fuel costs come to $16,455 monthly. Lucas also said the cost of tires is about $1,000 per car.

Lucas said the office is also in need of 83 body cameras.

He added that he plans to purchase 43 of them with funds from the sheriff’s office, and they will be used in the jail. The other 40 cameras would be used by officers on the road. Paboucek said seven of the deputies have no body cameras of their own and must borrow other deputies’ cameras when not otherwise in use.

She said the sheriff will be meeting with the Axon company to look at an estimate, but they will likely cost more than $400 each, including a contract to upload videos to Cloud storage and motion sensors to activate the camera and so eliminate the human error of forgetting to turn it on.

“This takes away the human error, and I think the liability for the county and for our office will be reduced,” Paboucek said.

Talk turned to expenses related to the Belmont County Jail. The food budget for next year is $480,000, with a price per meal of $3.35. In answer to a question from Commissioner J.P. Dutton, Lucas said the inmate population is typically 150-160 in the 144-bed facility.

Paboucek also said the money spent housing inmates outside of the jail due to crowded conditions has gone down by about $200,000, from $460,000 last year to $212,000 this year to date. Inmates are most frequently housed out-of-county in Monroe and Noble counties.

Inmate population has not risen to the onerous pre-COVID level, when the jail sometimes housed more than 200 inmates. Lucas said the courts have been looking at other sentencing options such as home monitoring. He said there is a preponderance of other factors including less of a transient workforce that may have worked to reduce inmate numbers.

Lucas said jail inmates are not suited to outside work such as litter pickup. Unlike inmates at the Belmont Correctional Institution, the jail inmates have not gone through any detoxification process for drug issues, and many inmates also have pre-existing conditions.

“It’s a preponderance of everything. People come in, and we have a medical staff. If someone’s having problems, we’ve got to treat them. And if our staff can’t treat it, they go to the hospital,” Lucas said.

In July, budget requests from the various departments for next year came to $45 million. The budget appropriated for 2023 was $35,270,000, including encumbered funds carried over from 2022. The sheriff’s budget for this year was $8.8 million. The final budget will likely be released closer to the end of the year.