EPC sheriff criticizes commissioners over OEM plan

On Friday, a day after issuing a written statement, El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa held a news conference to express his opinions about a plan to remove some of his authority.

“The public will not be as safe tomorrow as they were yesterday. That, I’m very confident about,” he said.

From his downtown office, Maketa opposed a plan by county commissioners to take his oversight of the Office of Emergency Management. The commissioners voted for the move two weeks ago, pending approval of a final plan approved by the offices of Maketa and the incoming sheriff, Bill Elder.

Maketa’s concern about the plan, he said, is that it violates the requirements of Question 1-A, a voter-approved tax increase in 2012 to generate money for public safety needs identified by the sheriff. Such needs included responding to disasters and emergencies like the 2012 Waldo Canyon Fire, the 2013 Black Forest Fire and flooding in the fall of 2013.

Maketa said under the plan, commissioners want to take responsibility for as much as $10 million in personnel and resources paid from 1-A funds without having anyone qualified to properly utilize those resources.

“I think honestly, what (commissioners are) hoping is I’ll slide out and take that knowledge of the money — that they owe the Sheriff’s Office and the 1-A budget — and never pay it back,” he said. “If the commissioners do plan on taking the resources and the funding from those positions that are not specific to the ballot issue, then they’re being unethical.”

Maketa went on to say that he believes commissioners are retaliating against his refusal to resign because of the current investigation of improper behavior in his office.

“I think they’ve had this planned and in the works and they’ve been trying to get me out of the way because they know I would oppose it, and I would go public with it,” he said. “If I was gone, if they beat me into the ground, then maybe I’d just quietly go away.”

Maketa said he went public with his concerns because many of his employees are confused about whether they will work for the Sheriff’s Office or commissioners after the proposed transition.

Despite his criticism, however, Maketa said a transition still can work — as long as commissioners cooperate and assume control only of four administrative OEM positions currently in his office.

In a related matter Friday, representatives of Maketa’s and Elder’s offices joined several county officials in the first meeting to discuss how to manage the transition between departments.

Commissioner Peggy Littleton, the only commissioner to vote against the transition plan, said she did so partly because her fellow commissioners had no final plan in place. However, she was part of a unanimous vote two weeks ago to discuss, formulate and approve a plan.

R.C. Smith, Waldo Fire recovery manager for the county, said both transition teams expect to have a rough draft of the plan by next Friday, and are still on schedule to complete the transition by early December.

But Littleton said she’s skeptical of the teams’ ability to meet their deadline and that she’s not ruling out returning full control of the OEM back to the Sheriff’s Office.