Contract, cont. from front

approved with a 2 - 1 vote. While the vote wasn’t unanimous, the commissioners were in total agreement that Sheriff Matt Hassel’s performance wasn’t satisfactory.

“I’m upset with the fact that parents out at Lakeville can’t get patrols to protect the handicap children. We can’t get patrols to police county roads, to stop the trucks from destroying them. We’ve heard some things going on,” said Commissioner Stan Klotz.

“A few years ago the sheriff was written out of our Emergency Winter Preparedness plan because there’s no input from him. Just recently he was taken off the EMA Advisory Council,” said Commissioner Kevin Overmyer.

“He’s been less than a team player,” said Commissioner Mike Burroughs. “When a governor of the State of Indiana passes an ordinance during an emergency declaration and the county sheriff says we’re not going to enforce it, I don’t know how that county sheriff, who has taken an oath to uphold that said order. How does he stay in business? How does he stay in that office?”

Overmyer agreed with Burroughs citing that the county ordinance mirrors the governor’s.

“And that’s what’s disappointing, along with all the other things mentioned,” Burroughs said.

Commissioner Klotz stated that his concerns originated before the recent emergency declaration and mask mandate.

“It’s getting out of control,” Klotz said.

County Attorney Jim Clevenger informed the commissioners that the contract is the same contract that has been used with every other county sheriff in the past, with the exception of changed dates and amount of pay.

The compensation for the sheriff for the 2021 calendar year is $91,125.80.

Before the commissioners approved the contract, Clevenger was asked what would happen if the commissioners decided not to approve the contract. Commissioner Overmyer pointed out that this was in the county’s salary ordinance.

“We went to this contract years ago because sheriffs in the State of Indiana have various options and means by which they can get paid and some of that has to do with, it was all over the board about how these things got done, but they collected a certain percentage of warrants, sheriff’s sale, money from feeding prisoners, all of these things,” Clevenger said.

Clevenger added that when the county went to a contract, some sheriffs in other counties were being paid “twice what our county sheriff was getting paid just because they were making money off of running the jail and some of those kind of operations.”

He also added that the sheriff is an elected office. “Normally, if someone is not doing their job they don’t get elected.”

If the contract had not been approved, according to Indiana Code 36-2-13-2.8 a county that has a population between 40,000 and 65,500 “the county must pay the sheriff an annual salary that is equal to at least seventy percent of the annual minimum salary that would be paid by the state to a full-time prosecuting attorney in the county.”

In the same code, it outlines other methods of compensation that the county attorney mentioned.

“He could actually, I suppose, end up reverting to those means to get paid and make more money,” Clevenger said.

County Sheriff Matt Hassel was out of town Monday and, therefore, not present to comment on the Commissioner’s statements regarding his performance.