LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Published: April 17, 2008

Editor:

Sheriff Weaver has asked for a mid-year pay boost for his deputies based on his assertion that the “…people we’ve lost in the last six months have gone to other counties for higher salaries. We’re becoming a training ground for other counties.”

The normal process is to request changes in pay as part of the proposed budget, to take effect in the new budget year. Mr. Weaver says he can pay for these raises on the basis of salary savings from the vacant positions.

However, since he did not say he would give up any of the vacant positions, we have to assume he intends to fill them — at the higher pay rate. We do not know that the deputies who left did so in order to take higher paying law enforcement jobs in other counties. There were no formal, objective exit interviews, and Mr. Weaver does not tell us where the former deputies went to work, or what their new pay is (if he even knows). In fact several of the former deputies have sent letters to the board of supervisors clarifying why they left — which did not include complaints about pay.

As for the issue of pay itself, according to information supplied by the county administrator, as of Feb. 5 the sheriff’s office had 18 full-time deputies. Their average base pay was $39,622.

If you take out the top two highest paid deputies, Warren Jenkins ($67,300) and Gary Harvey ($61,080), the average base pay for the remaining 16 deputies was $36,551. That is more than 72 percent of what the remaining county employees (excluding school personnel and elected officials) earn.
What about the pay in other counties? A quick check on the internet reveals that Culpeper County deputies who are certified and who have between two and five years of service are paid $36,579, while Orange County pays their deputies a starting salary of $32,629. This is, of course, a limited sample — but it would seem to indicate that salaries for Madison County deputies are consistent with those of their peers in other central Virginia counties.

Charles P. McDowell
Reva