_{Curry County Board of Commissioners Meeting from Dec. 19. Thumbnail: Keina Wolf, the county’s finance and human resources director, sits at the far left on the dais. | Screenshot}

(Update at 2:51 p.m. Dec. 30. Curry County commissioners delayed renewing an employment contract with Finance and Human Resources Director Keina Wolf at their Dec. 19 meeting.)

Curry County commissioners declined to renew delayed renewing an employment contract with their finance and human resources director, Kiena Wolf, at last week’s meeting. 

Wolf, who was in attendance at that meeting, found herself on the defensive against critics arguing that the county couldn’t afford the expense.

One critic, Michele Martin, a member of a Facebook group called Citizens For Curry Justice, criticized Wolf’s proposed salary of $130,000 per year and said the $15,000 professional development allowance it calls for is more than the training budget at the Curry County Sheriff’s Office.

Rod Palmquist, a representative for Teamsters Local 223, which represents sheriff’s office employees, repeated the statement regarding the training budget for Wolf’s department, comparing it with that of the sheriff’s office. He told commissioners that the proposed employment agreement prioritized bureaucracy “over the very safety of the community you were elected to serve.”

A third critic was County Assessor and Tax Collector Kylie Wagner, who said that Wolf, who does much of her work from her home in Lane County, “should be here in the trenches with the rest of us.”