Both Grant County Judge Dennis Reynolds and Sheriff Glenn Palmer are right in many respects, although they differ 180 degrees on a lingering personnel issue. The issue is whether sheriff’s department employees, particularly salaried employees, should be allowed to receive compensation from the Forest Service for work they render during fire season.

Reynolds is right that exempt salaried employees do not qualify for overtime. He also is right to point out that state ethics law brings into question a past practice of department personnel receiving contract pay on top of salaries for work they performed under a forest-patrol contract.

On the flip side, Sheriff Palmer is right that his staff finds itself approaching chronic burnout from working excruciating hours. And Undersheriff Jim McNellis is right that law enforcement does not resemble other professions where employees can leave at the end of a workday. Burnout seems to be an occupational hazard for law enforcement officers.

The difficulty of managing these long hours can result in employees working well beyond reasonable shifts. However, overtime is not an option for salaried employees.

Sheriff Palmer sought out and received the opinion of the Government Standards and Practices Commission in Salem, which stated what Reynolds had suspected: that “exempt” salaried employees do not qualify for overtime pay.

So for Palmer, McNellis and other salaried county employees, you work until the job is done without extra pay. Unfortunately, for law enforcement, the job is never done.

This whole issue came to a head last week with a budgetary question. Sheriff’s department employees asked if they could receive personal reimbursement for spending days off and non-work hours helping the Forest Service with firefighting-related support. Reynolds wondered whether this type of reimbursement met the standard of state ethics law, which governs personal behavior by public officials.

As it turns out, the law is clear. Public officials are not allowed to accrue extra financial benefits from their positions. And the state commission which oversees government practices confirmed that salaried personnel cannot qualify for overtime pay.

It seems like a Catch-22 for the sheriff’s department.

We urge both the County Court and the sheriff’s department to move on from this fact-finding effort and look at the bigger picture. They both need to improve communication among themselves with a face-to-face meeting. They need to talk about ways to ease the work crunch in the sheriff’s department.

We sympathize with the difficulties of communication. It’s a tough assignment to understand a conflicting viewpoint, and frenzied schedules on both sides limit the opportunity for these folks to sit down and talk. However, communication is sorely needed. The job of public service is rendered so much harder when misconceptions fly back and forth like flaming arrows. We’re amazed at the misunderstandings and incomplete information that travel between two buildings that stand so close together – the Grant County Courthouse and the neighboring Grant County Justice Facility.

For example, in the Grant County Courthouse, officials were under the impression that sheriff’s department personnel wanted time-and-a-half pay for hours worked on the fires. Perhaps they had good reason for that belief. However, in the Grant County Justice Facility next door, the issue was not overtime, but flat contract pay.

“I’m not asking for overtime,” Palmer said. “I know that I’m not entitled to time and a half.”

However, in the past, before this sheriff took office, it was a common practice for salaried sheriff’s department employees to receive extra pay, not overtime, but a flat rate paid out of the contract with the Malheur National Forest for forest patrols.

It seems unlikely such a practice is legal. So the larger problem continues to loom. Too few people are trying to do too much work.

Last year, the county bought out employees’ compensatory time for $14,000, and most of it (about $9,000) centered in the sheriff’s department. At one point, the department accrued 586 hours of comp time on the books, a potentially devastating accrual for budget managers to handle.

On the other side of the ledger, staff of the sheriff’s department have run themselves ragged to keep up with public demand for law enforcement services. In an extraordinary show of dedication, undersheriff McNellis tallied 90 hours in a single week during the February manhunt for suspected murderer Almeron Hinton.

Unfortunately, there is no easy fix for this vicious circle.

To start, we need an effective relationship between the County Court and the sheriff’s department to help acknowledge the workload issues that plague that department. Our elected leaders must bridge the communication gap that separates the Grant County Courthouse from the Grant County Justice Facility. Otherwise, good people will burn out trying to do a job they love.