New Acting Tulsa County Sheriff Speaks On Jail Budget Crisis

The Tulsa County jail doesn’t have enough money to make it to the end of the fiscal year, so Tuesday, new acting sheriff, Michelle Robinette, took a turn at balancing the books and went public for the first time.

Robinette told the board she's looking closely at the jail's budget and working on short-term, quick fixes to get the jail out of the red. She's been in the position of acting Tulsa County Sheriff for one week and is already cutting jail expenses.

She told the Tulsa County Budget Board, support personnel have been transferred from the jail payroll to the sheriff's office payroll.

"In an attempt to alleviate some of that we have transferred them over. We can absorb them and pay their payroll as opposed to having them on the jail," Robinette said.

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It costs around $34 million each fiscal year to operate the county jail. County leaders say, right now, there's not enough money to get through the year regardless of who's serving as sheriff.

Tulsa County Commissioner Ron Peters said, "We obviously have some financial issues at the jail, but that would be the case no matter who we are dealing with.”

A jail medical contract payment is three months overdue - it totals $1.5 million.

Also, the County owes a $700,000 bill to a construction company for building the framework of a new sheriff's office training center.

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Because of the tight budget, the County has stopped that project altogether.

The board brought up the sheriff's office cash fee fund, which has $1.4 million in it. They said that money could be used to cover other costs, but that idea is what led to a heated discussion last week between commissioners and then acting sheriff, Rick Weigel who announced his retirement the next day.

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“We were encouraging him to use it to pay bills with instead of using it for long-term stuff," Peters said.

Weigel told commissioners he wanted to use the money in that fund to give deputies longevity pay.

Robinette told the board she's looking into how the money in that account can be used to pay off debt. As acting sheriff, she's the only one who can decide how it will be spent.

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