We’ve been gratified to see the Grant County Court begin to grapple with the question of how to increase the budget for the sheriff’s office. It’s an important topic that calls for a thorough public discussion.

The subject was initially raised at the court’s Jan. 18 meeting, and an initial work session on the matter was held Feb. 22. It’s high time law enforcement funding got the attention it deserves. Almost a year and a half has passed since John Day dissolved its police department, and as Sheriff Todd McKinley will tell you, the surge in calls for service coming into his department (and, to a lesser extent, the Oregon State Police outpost in John Day) shows no signs of abating.

The Grant County Sheriff’s Office has eight sworn officers available to patrol the county’s 4,500 square miles (an area larger than Delaware, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia combined). Is that enough personnel to do the job? The sheriff certainly doesn’t think so. Based on a national standard of 2.5 officers per 1,000 people, McKinley told the Grant County Court at is Feb. 22 work session, he needs about 17.5 full-time-equivalent positions to adequately patrol the county (which has population of 7,337, according to the latest estimate). And keep in mind that two of those currently pulling patrol detail are the sheriff and the undersheriff, whose time surely could be better spent in other ways. As it stands, McKinley told the court, he is so short-staffed that his people are running themselves ragged trying to keep up with all the 911 calls coming in.

But while McKinley is clear that he wants to add more sworn officers to his department, he is equally adamant about the need to raise pay levels for his deputies. The sheriff told the court that Grant County deputies earn less than those of any other Oregon sheriff’s office, making it extremely difficult to recruit new officers — or keep them from leaving for better-paying jobs after they’ve been trained. “Currently,” he told the court, “we’re at the bottom of the barrel.”

So far, several ideas have been floated for raising additional revenue for the sheriff’s office. They include creating a taxing district, which would involve raising property taxes; getting John Day and some of the other municipalities in the county to follow Prairie City’s lead by contracting with the sheriff’s office for a certain amount of dedicated patrol time each month; pursuing grant funding; and seeking state assistance. These are all topics that the county court will continue to discuss in the weeks and months ahead, and there will be opportunities for public input along the way.

McKinley has not yet put a firm dollar figure on how much additional revenue it would take to bring his department’s staffing and pay levels up to where he thinks they ought to be, but it clearly won’t be cheap. Once we have hard numbers to work with, we can begin to ask ourselves, as a county, exactly how safe we want to be — and exactly how much money we’re willing to spend to get there.