The Valley Signal

Health & Safety

The County Asks Cities to Pay for Dispatch Service That Can't Spend Allocated Funds.

Teton County wants Driggs and Victor to help pay for its Sheriff's Office, even as it leaves much of the dispatch money it has already allocated unspent.

By Wade Williams ·

DRIGGS — Teton County asked the Driggs City Council on July 7 to help pay for its Sheriff's Office, requesting $150,000 for two dispatcher positions, $5,000 toward a data dashboard, and, later, money toward more deputies.

Before it commits any money, the council wants to see how the county's law enforcement uses the funding it already receives. Its members pointed to a "public safety task force" as the place to sort that out. But the same task force is being asked to be three different things at once: a fix for the dispatch center, the county's vehicle for getting the cities to help fund the Sheriff's Office, and the lever Driggs brought to its July 7 meeting to hold that office accountable. The county has already decided the body will advise, not govern.

The task force traces to Fire Chief Mike Maltaverne, who has pressed the county for months to fix the 911 dispatch center. "This is not about them," he said of the dispatchers at a July 1 county meeting. "It's about the governance of that center."

The Teton County Sheriff's Office houses the dispatch center, the county commission funds it, and the cities that depend on it pay nothing directly toward the center and see little of how it operates. At the July 1 meeting, Commissioner Ron James argued for a body with authority to govern dispatch. County administrator Billie Siddoway warned that transferring governance from the sheriff to another body would be "a big decision" that requires "more discussion and voting." The board settled on an advisory committee, not a governing one.

Commissioner Dan Powers told the Driggs council that Driggs residents pay about 17 percent of the county's property taxes but generate 28 percent of the sheriff's workload, a share he called an estimate. By his math, Driggs residents' property taxes now cover about $294,000 of the sheriff's costs; by workload, they would pay about $476,000. He asked Driggs to cover both budgeted dispatcher positions, at $75,000 each, from its local-option sales tax, and said the county would later seek help raising its deputy count from 19 to 21. The county made the same case to Victor the next night, asking the city for $120,000; together, the two cities' shares would fund about three and a half dispatch positions. Driggs already pays the county $45,000 a year directly, on top of its residents' property taxes, for enhanced patrol under a 2021 contract that renews automatically.

The county has not been short of dispatch money. Over the four years through 2025, it budgeted $2.83 million for its 911 center and spent $1.85 million. Maltaverne attributes the $983,000 gap to dispatcher jobs the county could not fill. It pays its dispatchers $24.96 an hour, which County Clerk Kim Keeley called "the high end in the state" at the July 1 meeting; Teton County, Wyoming, starts its dispatchers near $36, with a signing bonus and a law-enforcement pension. The state's review of Idaho's 911 system, published in March, found that the $1-per-phone-line fee that funds emergency communications cannot legally pay dispatcher salaries. Those come from general funds. The county is asking Driggs to fund dispatch positions at a center that, over four years, left much of its own budget unspent.

The county's jail bill doubled this year to about $600,000 after Jefferson County's sheriff ended a longstanding agreement to house Teton inmates last fall, and the county signed on with Madison County at $102 per day. Powers told the council the county is not asking the cities to help with jail.

Driggs Council President Allison Michalski asked whether the county could produce a report showing what the city received for its payments last year, "to gauge," she said, "what you're asking for this year against the need." During public comment, a resident urged Driggs to withhold any money, arguing a city payment would double-tax residents who already pay county taxes, until the Sheriff's Office allowed more oversight. The resident said the county should instead form a law-enforcement district and levy taxes on all its taxpayers.

Siddoway pitched the cities a data dashboard, Domo, that the county wants each to help buy at $5,000 a year. The cities had asked before for more information about the Sheriff's Office, she said. Siddoway said she had assembled similar figures by hand, once estimating that deputies spent about 100 hours on security checks in 2025. At the county's July 1 meeting, Siddoway had said the Driggs mayor first floated the same task force at a Council of Governments session, framed around education. The tone in Driggs' chambers on July 7 was closer to an audit. The next night, Siddoway told Victor's council the county had heard it was "frustrating that we show up once a year and ask for money," and pitched the task force as "a conversation that goes on throughout the year." Dispatch, the chief's reason for the body, went unmentioned.

Maltaverne wants dispatch to get down to brass tacks. The county wants the cities to help fund the Sheriff's Office. Siddoway wants to spend $20,000 to $30,000 a year on data visualization to close a gap in what she and the Sheriff's Office can provide. Driggs wants to see the numbers. The committee the county has designed will host all of them, but the Board of County Commissioners built it to share information and advocate for budgets, not to hold anyone accountable.

What to watch: The county plans to convene the broader task force in early August but has not yet set a date. Whether it takes up the question the county has so far declined to answer will determine what the meeting is worth: who is responsible for a dispatch center the Sheriff houses, which the county funds, and the cities are now asked to help pay for.

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