Tompkins takes on big challenges

The fact that Donna Tompkins will be Muscogee County’s first-ever female sheriff has undeniable local historic significance. But that’s not the sheriff-elect’s, or the citizens’, most immediate concern as she prepares to take office.

First, according to Tompkins herself, is a training refresher. Although she is a veteran law enforcement officer, having retired not long ago at the rank of captain, she will head to Forsyth for four weeks of state-mandated training by the Georgia Sheriffs Association for newly elected sheriffs.

More important will be leadership of the office she will head after she is sworn in, which Tompkins said should be on Jan. 3. She will have the responsibility of leading a department whose budget requests — and actual spending — have been at extreme odds with the city’s estimates for years now, and whose relationship with city leaders has been strained at best.

Incumbent Sheriff John Darr has argued that constitutionally mandated duties of the office have made the city’s allotments completely inadequate, to the point of a pending (and now, perhaps, moot) lawsuit.

Tompkins pledged in her campaign to drop the suit and operate the department within the budget approved by the Columbus Consolidated Government.

Now she will be expected to deliver on that pledge. Financial accountability and eliminating department functions that do not fall within the Sheriff’s Department’s constitutional mandate — both of which she has said she will do — will make for a good start.

But given the vast fiscal discrepancy between what her predecessor insists is necessary and what the mayor and council have insisted is adequate, finding enough cost savings to reconcile those numbers might be a tough task.

Which leads directly to her second stated mission, rebuilding the relationship between the department and the city officials who write those budgets. That will mean that any future differences that might arise between what the new sheriff thinks the department needs and what the city is willing to allot for it must not again become irreconcilable.

Early harvest

On the subject of law enforcement and budgets — or in this case, proposed budgets — the Atlanta Business Chronicle reports that Gov. Nathan Deal’s plan to seed the ranks of officers with better pay is already bearing fruit, even before the seeds are actually sown.

The governor said during a Tuesday speech at the University of Georgia that there have been more applications to the Georgia State Patrol in the past month than in all of the previous fiscal year.

We have supported Deal’s plan from the outset: Not only does it call for better pay for one of the most underpaid lines of dangerous work in our society, but it also includes better training for officers in handling volatile and potentially — but, with the right training, perhaps not necessarily — lethal situations.

Georgia needs to attract the best people it can get to do what is often a thankless job and, far too often, a dangerous one. But there might be no more necessary one.

This story was originally published December 7, 2016 at 3:14 PM with the headline "Tompkins takes on big challenges."