Excessive spending by former Sheriff Robert G. Pepersack has left the department more than $300,000 in the red, county budget officials said yesterday.
John R. Hammond, the county financial officer, said his office repeatedly warned Mr. Pepersack in memos last summer and fall to curb spending, but that the warnings went unheeded.
"They spent the way they wanted to. We tried to control the sheriff's office spending, but we weren't successful," Mr. Hammond said.
As a result, Sheriff George Johnson, who defeated Mr. Pepersack last fall, entered office Dec. 5 with a projected deficit of $569,000, which amounts to 28 percent of the department's $2 million budget. Cost-cutting efforts have reduced the deficit to $300,000.
"It was just mind-boggling," Sheriff Johnson said.
The county's $42,000-a-year sheriff cannot be fired by the county executive and answers only to him and the County Council during the annual budget sessions.
To shrink the deficit, Sheriff Johnson has reduced overtime for full-time deputies, slashed hourly pay rates for part-time deputies and cut from 20 to 10 the number of part-timers providing courthouse security.
Sheriff Johnson said he cut the pay for part-timers to $10 from $11.65 an hour and has ended a $50,000 program that paid full-time deputies two hours of overtime once every two weeks to wash their squad cars and clean their firearms.
In addition, there may be no money for a six-member squad he had hoped to establish to bring to court parents who are delinquent in their child support payments.
"It's made us live in a real bare-bones kind of situation," Sheriff Johnson said.
Mr. Pepersack disputed the financial officer's numbers yesterday.
He acknowledged that he anticipated a $100,000 deficit by the time the current fiscal year ends on June 30. But he said that was because several earlier trials had forced him to beef up security with part-time deputies. "We had 11 courts working on any given day. With a high-security trial going on, you're going to need the manpower," he said.
He said county budget analysts had exaggerated the deficit, noting that equipment purchases such as squad cars came early in the year and boosted spending beyond projected levels for that portion of the budget.
"They [budget officials] were saying that after a quarter of the year was over, we should have spent 25 percent of our budget. But if you buy the big-ticket items early in the year, the numbers [for the fiscal quarters] won't reflect that, and that's what happened," he said.