The Park County commissioners once again approved a replacement position for the Park County Sheriff’s Office and mulled the idea of dropping the requirement to have departments get commission approval to replace a budgeted position until after the budget situation at the state Legislature for next year is more clear. 

Commissioners unanimously approved the request at the Oct. 21 meeting to replace a dispatcher who had recently resigned. 

As both Sheriff Darrell Steward and Undersheriff Andy Varian said, there’s not much room to run low on positions. 

“With the dispatchers, we run 24/7 coverage, and oftentimes during the night, we’ll only have one dispatcher on,” Steward said. “We’ve been running somewhere between 150 to 225 calls for service for 24 hours … So it is nice during the day or during the busy times to have actually two on duty. One covers the city, one covers the county.”

Varian said while dispatchers only have two weeks of training at the academy in Douglas, the department tries to get them through a good chunk of the 10-12 weeks of in-house training before they go to Douglas to ensure they’re more prepared or weed out those who realize the job is not for them. 

Commissioner Lloyd Thiel, who has been critical of some of the requests to replace workers that have come forward since the last budget approval — during which there was discussion of a potential hiring freeze — said he wasn’t going to go against emergency services being fully staffed. 

“I’m going to have to support emergency services if they need them,” he said, adding that it’s a waste of time for them to have to come before the board if, as has been the case, commissioners are in favor of departments hiring to fill already budgeted positions. 

Commissioners discussed, but didn’t appear to make a final decision, on whether or not to continue making department heads go to the board to request to fill a budgeted position. 

The decision to allow the dispatcher position to be filled was made unanimously, and former Sheriff Scott Steward, Darrell’s brother, reiterated the importance of the position. 

“At the staffing level they’re at, it’s almost impossible to go below that,” he said, adding that in his tenure he would ensure deputies checked in on dispatchers after especially stressful calls. “That’s one of the most stressful jobs in that entire department.”