Thumbnail photo courtesy of Curry Civic TV.
Nearly two weeks after he and his colleagues agreed to help fund a school resources officer position, Curry County Commissioner Jay Trost thanked the Brookings City Council for their own commitment to the program.
According to Trost, who is also chairman of the Brookings-Harbor School District Board of Trustees, the school district is facing “a financial strain right now.” The Curry County Board of Commissioners was able to “pick up that SRO piece that was held by the school district,” Trost told the City Council on Monday.
“The City of Brookings pulls the majority of the weight financially to ensure the SRO position stays intact and is valued,” he said. “So I want to thank you for your commitment to that as well.”
Trost and the two other Curry County commissioners directed staff on April 15 to draft an intergovernmental agreement with the City of Brookings. This agreement will include a financial contribution of $18,409 toward the school resources officer position, which would cover the school district’s financial share of about 12.5 percent, Curry County Director of Operations Ted Fitzgerald said.
The county’s funding will allow the school resources officer position to continue next fiscal year, Fitzgerald said.
The Board’s decision comes as the Brookings-Harbor School District, also known as School District 17C, faces a $1.2 million budget shortfall, according to Trost. This deficit is due to a drop in student enrollment, he said.
“How we address that is still being discussed,” he said. “The one commitment that has been made is we will not be reducing any school days. There are some school districts facing huge shortfalls and they’re reducing school days and [facing] giant reductions in staff. We aren’t there.”
The county’s contribution of $18,409 comes from opioid settlement funds the county can use toward opioid prevention, treatment and recovery programs, according to Fitzgerald. The Board of Commissioners had approved a five-year intergovernmental agreement with the City of Gold Beach in October for a school resource officer position that would transition to a community resource officer during the summer months.
However, Gold Beach officials notified the county that they were unable to “fill or fund such a position” and said they couldn’t move forward with the program, according to Fitzgerald’s April 15 staff report.
Fitzgerald said he had spoken with Brookings Police Chief Kelby McCrae about a week before the Board of Commissioners’ April 15 meeting and the day of the meeting.
“They’re looking at a shortfall for the whole program from School District 17C’s share of about 12.5 percent, which equals $18,400 and some change,” Fitzgerald told commissioners. “That’s how much they’re looking for from us and since we do have those opioid funds that were returned to us from the City of Gold Beach — I think the check was $74,000-something that we got last week — we have funds available that will be addressing the same basic issues the commission had committed to some months ago.” The school resources officer role in Brookings is a shared-cost position, said Trost, who is able to hold two elected positions in Oregon if one is unpaid. When the school district let the city know that it wasn’t able to cover the position this year, the City of Brookings reached out to Curry County.
The school district’s budget committee hasn’t yet convened to discuss how to address the financial shortfall, though Trost said their goal is to make cuts “as far away from the kids as possible.”
In September the Curry County Board of Commissioners met with municipalities in the county to discuss how to address law enforcement and public safety. This meeting came toward the beginning of a dispute between the Board and the Curry County sheriff and followed the failed May 2024 tax levy, which in turn led to cuts at the sheriff’s office.
On Oct. 17, Curry County commissioners had received competing proposals for using about $525,000 in opioid settlement dollars. One of those proposals was a $149,100 intergovernmental agreement with Gold Beach to pay for a school resource officer who would also serve as a community resource officer.
The other proposal came from Lt. Jeremy Krohn, the Curry County Sheriff’s Office jail commander, who asked for $36,000 to provide telehealth services to inmates struggling with addiction. Then-finance director Keina Wolf told commissioners that there were enough opioid settlement dollars to fund both programs.
At that meeting, now-former commissioner Brad Alcorn had argued that an SRO teaching children about the dangers of opioid use is in line with the opioid settlement agreement.
On Monday, just before the Brookings City Council approved the city’s 2025 master fee schedule, Finance Director Lu Ehlers said that the county agreeing to contribute to the school resource officer position means that the city didn’t have to increase its public safety fee.
According to Ehlers, the City Council had discussed increasing the public safety fee by about 50 cents.
Overall, Brookings’ 2025 master fee schedule includes a cost-of-living increase of about 2.7 percent rounded to the nearest dollar on most items, according to Ehlers’ staff report.
