By Austin Huguelet
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — The city sheriff is threatening to stop transporting city jail detainees to and from hospitals for medical care unless the city approves increases to his office’s budget.
In a letter to Mayor Cara Spencer earlier this week, Sheriff Alfred Montgomery said his office, struggling with a budget crisis, had neither the money nor the responsibility for the service. And he said the task takes deputies away from “core law enforcement duties.”
Starting June 9 , the city corrections department will have to do it instead, he wrote.
The broadside marked an escalation of Montgomery’s ongoing efforts to secure more funding for his office, which is currently projected to overspend its budget by more than $600,000 in the current fiscal year. If the threat is carried out, it could cause problems for a jail trying to improve health care for inmates after years of problems.
It also sparked yet another controversy for the newly elected sheriff, who since taking office in January has ordered the arrest of a top jail official and been sued over it, told a deputy to roll golden dice to keep his job, and raised eyebrows with the purchase of $11,700 worth of used golf carts.
Spencer said the threat was an abdication of the sheriff’s responsibilities, which in St. Louis boil down to transporting prisoners, providing courthouse security and serving legal papers.
“To just abdicate this important duty is deplorable,” Spencer told the Post-Dispatch.
She added that his budget trouble was no excuse. She said his decision to fire more than a dozen office leaders who served under former Sheriff Vernon Betts likely cost the city hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts of accrued leave. Then he dug the hole deeper hiring prominent lobbyists and buying the golf carts, she said.
“It’s a basic failure to manage resources within a budget,” Spencer said.
Alderman Rasheen Aldridge , who chairs the Board of Aldermen’s budget committee, said Thursday he had already reached out to Montgomery to demand his presence at a hearing.
“He’ll be in front of the budget committee on Monday,” Aldridge said.
Montgomery previously complained about the burdens of the hospital transportation duty to the budget committee earlier this month.
He said his hospital unit was critically understaffed, and that he was having to pull from his office’s overtime budget to get shifts covered. And he complained that the city corrections department, which runs the jail, wasn’t helping despite having armed staff and more than $10 million budgeted for medical services in the coming year.
Paul Payne, the city’s budget director, said that money is budgeted to pay the contractor that provides health care in the downtown jail.
Spencer campaigned on reversing the city’s long-running population decline, and said on Tuesday she wouldn’t waver now.
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