INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — The Marion County Sheriff’s Office is asking the Indianapolis City-County Council for a higher budget in 2025 to address low pay and avoid bad outcomes.

The proposed 2025 budget for the sheriff’s office is more than $141 million. That’s a big jump from the approved 2024 budget of just under $130 million.

Sheriff Kerry Forestal and the department’s Chief Financial Officer Kallan Carr made their budget presentation Wednesday evening to the council’s Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee.

“One of the important things is we used a study,” Forestal said. “We wanted to say, ‘We’re not just picking whole numbers out of the air, we had it analyzed,’ and we know we have to work within the entire (city-county) enterprise, and that the office of finance and budget has to work with a finite amount of dollars, but we just want it to be recognized that we put forward what is recommended for the safety of everyone.”

In Marion County, the sheriff provides law enforcement, jail management, and security for city government buildings; serves court warrants; maintain the sex offenders’ registry; operates the 911 center; and does tax collections and enforces local election laws.

The sheriff’s office has a $6 million deficit in 2024 after hiring deputies and paying overtime to fill empty shifts.

“That $6 million has to be reflected in the 2025 budget. It will be caught up in 2024, but we have an increase in staff that has contributed to that $6 million,” Carr said. “So, to fund the agency at current operations, that $6 million also needs to be in the 2025 budget.”

Safety is key for the sheriff’s office, which its leader say remains understaffed despite recent hires.

Forestall attributes the 2024 increase in staffing to hiring bonuses. So, more money will continue to attract deputies and fix staffing shortages in the long term.

The Democrat sheriff said, “If you have 45 deputies taking 150 people to 70 courts, and you need 99, it’s not surprising when something may happen, and our deputies work long and hard but they can only be in so many places in a short period of time.”

Forestal says starting pay in counties surrounding Indianapolis is in the low $60,000 range, and, in Marion County, starting pay is in the low $40,000 range.

Further complicating the 2025 budget presentation was an ongoing contract renegotiation with the police union. When that is completed, the sheriff’s office will better know the need for compensation. There’s no word on when that contract renegotiation could be done.

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