LAWTON - Nearly three months into Fiscal Year 202627, Comanche County elected officials again postponed a vote on adoption of a $12.5 million courthouse budget.
The problem is reconciling expenditures with anticipated revenues.
Yet another proposed budget was unveiled Monday morning.
•Version 1 was last year’s approved departmental budgets minus extras and safety awards.
•Version 2: last year’s budget minus extras and safety awards, MASA (Medical Air Services Association coverage for mediflights) reduced to $30,000, and loss of one staff position per office.
•Version 3: the FY26 budget minus extras and safety awards, MASA reduction to $30,000, and loss of two staff positions in most offices; (the Election Board, for example, has a staff of three but two of those are statutorily mandated positions).
•Version 4: last year’s approved budget minus extras and safety awards, MASA cut to $30,000, and no staff reductions.
•Version 5: last year’s budget minus 30%.
•Version 6, which was presented Monday to the commissioners: last year’s amounts minus 20%.
All six proposed FY27 budgets were prepared by District 2 Commissioner Johnny Owens, county records reflect.
At the request of District 3 Commissioner Josh Powers, County Clerk Carrie Tubbs said Monday she would bring back a seventh budget proposal next week that will feature cuts of
10%.
One proposal that has not been explored is the savings from an unpaid furlough of one or more days, perhaps a week, for all 125 county employees.
Also, through the first four plans, the Sheriff’s Department budget for FY27 remained unchanged from FY26: $2,896,292 - which amounts to 23% of the county’s entire budget for FY27.
Sheriff Michael Merritt reportedly maintained that a $300,000 grant from the state Attorney General’s office would be rescinded if his budget were cut. But Southwest Ledger was told by the AG’s staff that so long as the county budget cuts were imposed virtually across the board, including the sheriff’s office, that grant would be neither repealed nor reduced.
Another proposal yet to be examined in depth is increasing the number of inmates confined in the Comanche County Detention Center rather than outsourced to Grady, Greer and Washita counties.
It was unclear Monday whether the maximum permissible number of inmates in the CCDC is 240 or 260, or perhaps even more; the question was emailed by the Ledger to Jail Administrator David Weber but he was attending an out-of-town meeting.
The maximum allowable head count is critical because, for example, the total jail population Monday morning was 204, while 112 other inmates were incarcerated in the three other counties. At a maximum of $50 per inmate, that totaled $5,600 per day for out-of-county housing.
If the average number of inmates ‘farmed out’ to other counties were limited to a maximum of 100 per day at a cost of $50 each, that would amount to $1,825,000 per year, Powers noted.
The grand total of CCDC expenses in FY26 was $8.9 million, ledgers indicate. The latest estimate for FY27 is $7.958 million. “And I don’t know whether that includes oil changes, fuel costs and vehicle maintenance expenses,” he said.
“There’s going to have to be some kind of budget cut,” Powers told the Ledger. “The question is, how deep and where. Are there things that each elected county official can do without for a year or two until we get this budget stabilized?”
The commissioners voted Monday to table adoption of the county’s ‘estimate of needs’ for yet another week.