XENIA — The Greene County Sheriff’s Office will likely grow in coming months as several new positions have been budgeted for in the county’s 2016 budget. Included in that growth will be the reopening of the Greene County Adult Detention Center, likely in the summer months.
Greene County Sheriff Gene Fischer said his office is currently in the process of filling about 25 positions that were recently funded in the new budget. According to Fischer, two of those positions would be for additional courthouse security, two would be for new detectives and “five or six” would be for road patrols.
Fifteen additional spots would be in the office’s Corrections Division, which would help to staff the Greene County Adult Detention Center to fully reopen the facility and “alleviate some of the overtime that we’re already paying,” Fischer said. He recently estimated that the facility would likely be open “sometime this summer” after the positions are filled.
“We have already sped up the hiring process, but it’s still a process,” he said. “It’s going to take several weeks to get the candidates we do have, the backgrounds done. You gotta do thorough backgrounds… We go through so many applicants to fill a spot. You just can’t put anybody in that kind of environment.”
County officials laid plans to reopen the Adult Detention Center in the new year after 2009 county budget cuts forced them to cut the facility capacity in half. The new-year funding would allow the facility to fully reopen.
The sheriff’s office received about a $2.4 million jump in funding for the new staff in the 2016 budget to bring the office’s total budget to about $14.4 million.
When Greene County Commissioners approved the county’s 2016 budget in December 2015, County Administrator Brandon Huddleson said that increases to the sheriff’s office budget included $1.3 million to fully reopen the Adult Detention Center, as well as $1.1 million in funding for the new road patrols, courthouse security officers and detectives.