The Summit Board of County Commissioners heard presentations Tuesday from the county finance department and Citizen Budget Advisory Committee. Both recommended the county make cuts to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office budget.

County Finance Director David Reynolds presented slides with budget data going back to 2017, the first of which showed general fund revenues, costs broken out into salaries and operating, total expenditures and net revenue. 

As Reynolds continued, he showed more specific graphs to illustrate his point that full-time positions and spending on salaries within the Sheriff’s Office have increased since 2021. 

“There’s a very steep rise over the last four years as far as increased salaries and benefits cost,” Reynolds said about a graph of Sheriff’s Office budget data, “both due to the addition of new positions, but salary increases as well.”

Reynolds compared the salary costs and full-time employee increases in the Sheriff’s Office to those in the general fund, excluding the county’s six elected offices. From 2021 to 2025, general fund employees increased from 137 to 148, and salary spending increased from under $15 million to around $20 million, which Reynolds said followed a trend of 3% merit increases and “some other bumps along the way.”

The Sheriff’s Office full-time employee count went from 97 to 125 over the same period, while salary spending increased from $9.1 million to $17.2 million. Reynolds said the new employees are not driving most of the spending because the percentage increases are 29% and 90%, respectively.

“The (full-time equivalents) are one component,” Reynolds said. “The data shows that by far the more impactful piece has been the rise in salaries and benefits costs across that organization.”

Although he emphasized that there are no “apples-to-apples” comparisons between such unique communities, Reynolds pointed out that the Sheriff’s Office’s salaries and expenses, as percentages of the county’s general fund, and number of full-time employees are all higher than those figures for Eagle, Pitkin and Grand counties.

The Citizen Budget Advisory Committee’s presentation, given by member Matt Svoboda, compared Summit to other Colorado counties in public safety spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, which Svoboda said represented the level of activity in the county. Summit ranked second in the state in that metric behind Denver.

Svoboda’s slides also discussed crime rates and daily jail population in Summit, both of which have decreased from 2017 to 2025, and compared them to increases in total Sheriff’s Office spending and daily cost per inmate, respectively.

Reynolds finished his presentation with key findings from the budget department. He said the growth of the Sheriff’s Office budget as a share of the general fund is largely due to salary increases and reiterated that salary costs and full-time employees have not increased at the same rate.

During Reynolds’ time with the county, he said, it has used budget amendments to cover salary-driven budget deficits in the Sheriff’s Office. This year’s forecast expects the Sheriff’s Office spending to be $734,000 over its budget.

“That number really makes a lot of intuitive sense,” Reynolds said. “This board removed $600,000 from their salaries and wages budget, and to date, no plan to achieve those results has been shared with county staff.”

The final key finding stated that county staff will not be able to deliver a balanced general fund budget in 2026 “unless there are concessions from the Sheriff’s Office or a significant reduction in other general fund services.”

The citizen committee’s presentation ended with the recommendation that the board reduce public safety spending as a percentage of the total general fund. It also suggested ways to achieve that goal, like basing new budgets off actual spending from the prior 12 months instead of the previous year’s budget; more regularly comparing actual revenues and expenditures to the budget; developing a five-year strategic financial plan; and hiring a financial analyst to help Reynolds do that work.

Svoboda emphasized that he and the committee are not trying to defund law enforcement. He said they intend to help the commissioners understand budget data and look forward to focusing on other parts of the budget in the future.

“We don’t desire to be the public safety budget advisory committee,” Svoboada said.

Commissioners asked Reynolds and the committee members questions, but no decisions were made during the work session. No representatives from the Sheriff’s Office were present for the meeting, but Sheriff Jamie FitzSimons, who has already written a column laying out reasons his office’s budget shouldn’t be cut, provided a comment to Summit Daily via email.

FitzSimons wrote that the citizen committee’s presentation “paints a distorted picture of the Sheriff’s Office” and undermines the work of Sheriff’s Office employees.

“The people of this county deserve an honest, full accounting of how their safety is protected — not a spreadsheet with selective math and no context,” FitzSimons wrote. “I made two separate requests to (Summit Board of County Commissioners) Chair Eric Mamula to move the meeting so that I could attend and respond directly to the committee’s presentation. Both requests were denied, effectively excluding the Sheriff’s Office from a meaningful opportunity to participate in the discussion.”

Summit County communications director Adrienne Isaac wrote in an email that FitzSimons told Mamula he would be unable to attend in early April and asked for the work session materials. Mamula shared the documents May 2, and FitzSimons asked May 5, the day before the meeting, if it could be moved.

Isaac wrote that the board told FitzSimons he is welcome at future work sessions to present and discuss his office’s budget. The May 6 work session was public, and other members of his staff were welcome to attend in his place, she wrote.