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Curry County Sheriff John Ward has filed a State Bar complaint against County Counsel Ted Fitzgerald accusing him of pursuing a “directed vendetta fueled by personal animosity.”

In a Sept. 4 letter to the Oregon State Bar Association, Ward said Fitzgerald has “demanded that I provide him with numerous documents, data, video and so on,” and that Fitzgerald has threatened him and some of his staff.

Ward also states that Fitzgerald confronted him “in a threatening way, accused me of wrongdoing without specifics and conveyed contempt, animosity and disparagement” at Board of Commissioners meetings without interference or objection by county commissioners.

Ward copy and pasted his letter to the Oregon State Bar into an email he sent to the Wild Rivers Outpost on Thursday. In his letter to the State Bar, he included a letter he sent to Fitzgerald last week. The sheriff also included links to Board of Commissioner meeting footage on YouTube from Aug. 29 and July 31.

“It goes without saying that no law enforcement organization can function without proper and professional legal counsel with whom to consult as need arises,” he said. “Not unlike every client served by every lawyer and member of the Oregon State Bar, I trust that I may reasonably expect ethical, respectful, informed representation as a client by my lawyer — not a lawyer who contravenes his fiduciary and trust-based obligations at every step and every chance by accusing me of mismanagement and committing unspecified crimes according to him.”

Last Tuesday Ward told the Wild Rivers Outpost that he is speaking with his own attorney.  On Thursday, Ward said he would not “accept the invite or demand” from the Board of Commissioners to attend their meetings.

In his email to the Outpost, Ward attached an email thread between him and Fitzgerald from July 19 through Aug. 30 outlining Fitzgerald’s requests for information concerning the K9 program, the sheriff’s office’s overall staffing plan under the current budget and calls for service for the last two weeks of July.

In a letter to Fitzgerald, Ward said his emails have been “offensive and intrusive and not conducive to achieving goals for the county as a whole…”

On Monday, Fitzgerald said he received Ward’s letter outlining his concerns and informing him that he intended to file a complaint with the State Bar Association. Fitzgerald told the Outpost that had not seen the complaint itself yet.

Fitzgerald said the questions and requests for information he sent to the sheriff in the email thread come from the Board of Commissioners. He said he is the Board’s single point of contact with any department head and that he doesn’t “pretend to be an expert on law enforcement and staffing issues.”

Fitzgerald also sought to clarify a statement Ward made to the Outpost last week about his appointed position as Curry County Road Master and whether he has any control over the Road Department reserves.

“I have no control over any funding. The budget committee and commissioners have all the control,” Fitzgerald told the Outpost. “I’ve always gone out of my way to have no control whatsoever. [Ward’s statement] that I control funding for the Road Department and I’m against law enforcement … that’s defamatory on its face.”

Fitzgerald said since he received Ward’s letter, the Board of Commissioners has approved him engaging an ethics counsel.

“Basically it’s a lawyer who specializes in legal ethics and that person can look at the situation and give kind of an unbiased opinion,” he told the Outpost. “I’m waiting to hear back from that person.”

In Ward’s complaint to the State Bar Association, he states that since being hired as county counsel in 2022, Fitzgerald has been appointed as the county’s director of operations, board of commissioners office administrator, road master and director of planning and development.

Ward told the State Bar Association that Fitzgerald serves in those roles concurrently and said the “conflicted roles and obligations” prevent Fitzgerald from acting as legal counsel for the Sheriff’s Office.

According to Fitzgerald, the Road Department and the Department of Planning and Development currently don’t have individual directors. He said he’s probably saving the county about $500,000 by filling those roles. He also said his pay since he was engaged as director of operations hasn’t changed.

“That was the last pay adjustment I got,” Fitzgerald told the Outpost. “And I hadn’t assumed any of those roles, that happened over the course of attrition, and it’s a lot of work for me and my assistant. We do an awful lot in a lot of different departments.”

Fitzgerald said the county is currently seeking a public facilities director that could oversee building, planning, the road department, maintenance and parks.

“In planning not so much, but in the Road Department, in maintenance, it would be great to have somebody with an engineering background that do for all of those departments and provide a level of professionalism that right now we don’t have,” he said. “The reality is we have a funding crisis and, so, the commissioners have been strategizing about how to long-term deliver services more efficiently and cost effectively.”

Ward’s State Bar complaint against Fitzgerald came about two days before the Board of Commissioners met with elected officials and law enforcement representatives from Brookings and Gold Beach.

At that Friday meeting, Board Chairman Brad Alcorn said staffing levels at the Curry County Jail are so low that corrections deputies are working 12 hour shifts. The county needs help, Alcorn said. However, he acknowledged the communications breakdown between him and his colleagues and the sheriff.

“He is not attending our meetings. He’s not communicating with us,” Alcorn said. “He did not attend Wednesday’s meeting. He did not attend Wednesday’s executive session meeting. He did not attend the meeting I scheduled with our district attorney yesterday to discuss enforcement of vehicles in the turnouts that we’ve been getting a lot of complaints about, and he’s not here today.”

As a result, Alcorn said, he couldn’t say how many calls for service the sheriff’s office is receiving or how many reports it’s taking. He said he couldn’t say how many arrests or criminal citations have been made nor when call volumes are at their highest and lowest.

According to Curry County Sheriff Lt. Jeremy Krohn, who did attend Friday’s meeting, the sheriff’s office is budgeted to have 13 corrections deputies. Due to people leaving, there are 11 positions filled currently, he said.

However, between one deputy on an extended leave of absence, another being deployed through the National Guard, three with pre-approved vacation time and one deputy who is out sick, five corrections officers were staffing the jail this week, Krohn said Friday.

While some of those deputies are expected to return to work, five others are seeking jobs elsewhere, Krohn said. He added that the sheriff’s office is interviewing new deputies — Krohn said the office has received “the most applications that we’ve had in a long time” — but most of those applicants aren’t from Curry County.

“Everyone that we’re going to interview has no law enforcement background,” he said. “So with that comes a lengthy background [check] process of about eight weeks from the day we offer it to them until the day we get it done. If I offer [a job] to them on Monday, for instance, we’re looking at mid-November before they could even be a person in our jail.”

New corrections officers also have to go through a six-weeks corrections academy through the State of Oregon. There are only four such academies each year with the next one occurring in January, and as of Thursday, it only has 10 openings.

“Right now the plan we have in the near future is if we start to dip into those levels of staffing crisis again, we are going to have to pull people off of the road and staff the jail,” Krohn said. “That is the statutory requirement of the sheriff is the jail, so that is where the staffing will go.”

According to Krohn, if a solution isn’t reached, the sheriff’s association and Jail Command Council will reach out to their peers around the state to ask for help. Krohn said help will come if the county asks for it and if it’s available.

On Friday, Fitzgerald told commissioners that he and Krohn had discussed the possibility of entering into agreements with “allied agencies” to provide help if more road deputies are recruited to fill in at the jail.

Alcorn also mentioned that another potential would be working with Coos or Josephine counties to outsource jail operations, though Curry County would be responsible for transporting inmates and would have to have a holding facility.

One outcome on Friday was a willingness between commissioners and city representatives to see if opioid settlement dollars could be consolidated and used to fund a community resource officer or a school resource officer position.

Alcorn said Curry County currently has about $525,000 in opioid settlement dollars. Those are recurring funds and it changes every year, he said. He said he wanted to see if that money could be used “in a way that will help prioritize public safety and be impactful to everyone’s safety.”

One thing Curry County residents likely won’t go for is a tax increase, Commissioner-Elect Patrick Hollinger said. He pointed out that the county’s proposed tax levy to fund a 24-7 sheriff’s office failed in May by a margin of 3-1. There are other options besides asking for more tax money, Hollinger said.

The commissioner-elect also brought up Ward’s comments to the Outpost last week that he was being ambushed. Hollinger said at a previous meeting, the sheriff said he felt ambushed by him as well.

“I was accused of ambushing him when I came up and made those comments to recommend an audit to see how the money’s being spent,” Hollinger told commissioners. “To see how other policy and structure is in place. That doesn’t just come from me. That’s coming from many people wanting to know [that] the money is being used appropriately. So to have the ‘ambush’ come at me, that’s not called for.”

Krohn said Citycounty Insurance Services conducted a “best practice audit” of the jail and patrol division at the sheriff’s office. He said he reached out to a representative to get the report and expects it in a few weeks.

Gold Beach Mayor Tamie Kaufman said that while she’s open to working with the county on a school-resource officer position, the county needs a new jail and it needs to be staffed correctly. She said community leaders should start a conversation with residents about why the county is so broke and how it was traditionally funded.

“Believe it or not, there’s a lot of new people here that have no idea what O&C is,” she said, referring to Oregon and California Railroad Revested Lands that are mostly administered through the Bureau of Land Management. “‘What is that?’ Well it used to be a railroad.”

However, more than anything, Kaufman said, is commissioners have to figure out how to breach the divide with the sheriff. She pointed out that the Board of Commissioner’s job is to fund the sheriff’s office and jail and Ward’s job is to run it. He decides who gets hired and what happens with inmates.

Without his buy-in, commissioners can’t make the changes they’re seeking, Kaufman said.

“Figure out how to build that bridge, and I don’t know what that’s going to take. Somehow that’s probably going to be you guys being very humble and going to talk to him and apologize,” she said. “Whether you did or didn’t do something wrong, be the bigger man.”

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