ST. CLAIRSVILLE — The Belmont County Sheriff’s Office mobile app is no more.

Sheriff James Zusack said Tuesday that removing the app will save the office money and will allow him to put that money toward making the office paperless. The app was available on any smartphone and was free in the App Store on Apple devices and in the Google Play Store for Android devices since its launch in 2024.

Former sheriff Dave Lucas previously said that getting the app up and running was the most expensive part of the project, but he declined to provide the cost of creating it. He added that not $1 of taxpayer money was spent on it. Lucas said he used internal funds that his office generated, such as the commissary from the jail and Furtherance of Justice funds — an Ohio allowance for expenses the sheriff incurs in the performance of official duties and in furtherance of justice.

For those now accessing the app, a message pops up informing users that the Belmont County Sheriff’s Office will no longer be using the app to communicate to its users.

“We got our website up and running, so everything that the app did the website does,” Zusack said. “Our website has the inmate roster and everything like the app, and plus we have a Facebook page.”

Zusack said that although the app was paid for before its launch, his office does have to pay an annual fee to cover maintenance. He added that the money that would be used for the annual maintenance of the app will go toward his office using PowerDMS, which is a system that will push out policy and procedure to its officers as well as being used to do payroll, which will make the office virtually paperless.

“So what it does is it posts policy and procedures to all my people at work for me, and it’ll make them take tests. And everything’s done on your phone or a computer even, like time off will be done on your phone. So at any given point, I’ll know exactly who’s working. It’s a really neat system. So that’s what I wanted to get and free up some money to get it,” Zusack said.

“Any time we update policies, we have to make all those copies and distribute them. And this pushes them out over your phone, and it uses DocuSign and is really neat how it does it.”