Commissioners voted 4-0 for the Sheriff's Office to move forward with the policy adaptations during their Sept. 3 meeting. Commissioner Manny Ramirez left before the vote due to a previous engagement, but was present at the beginning of the meeting and voiced his approval of the proposition.
“I’m very pleased that the Sheriff’s Office has decided to go seek a third-party firm to come in and do a comprehensive review of those policies, so we can ensure best practices,” he said.
Zooming in
The sheriff's chief of staff, Jennifer Gabbert, told commissioners many of these proposals have been in the works for months or years and that the Sheriff’s Office wants the third-party consulting firm to be used as a resource for both new and existing policies and standard operating procedures.
The work done on the previous proposals before the request for a third-party audit will be used as a framework so the work efforts and hours put into updating these policies aren’t wasted, Gabbert said.
"We're hoping with this new court that's interested in going out of the previous comfort zones, that some of this would come to fruition for us," she said during the meeting.
What’s next
A timeline for these initiatives was not laid out by the Commissioners Court.
"The Court voted to support the Sheriff’s Office in pursuing these long-awaited projects and we look forward to implementing them in the near future," the Sheriff's Office wrote in a statement.
