 - Fremont County Sheriff Ryan Lee gave a positive update on staffing totals for his agency during a Fremont County Commission meeting this week. ){kind=link}
(Lander, WY) – Fremont County Sheriff Ryan Lee gave a positive update on staffing totals for his agency during a Fremont County Commission meeting this week.
“I am happy to report that our staffing is looking much better,” Lee told the Commission during a regular meeting Tuesday. “We’ve got almost all of our positions full.”
Specifically, he said, there are openings for five deputies in the detention facility, and four applicants are currently undergoing background checks for those positions.
“So that’s looking pretty good,” Lee said.
The emergency dispatch center is currently down one position, but an applicant is undergoing background checks for that spot, too, Lee said, and in the patrol and enforcement division, there are currently two open positions in Dubois, but “just recently I was down several positions in Riverton, (and) we have those full now.”
His agency also recently hired a new information technology staffer, who is “working out very well,” Lee said.
Commissioner Mike Jones pointed out that, in the past, the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office has had trouble filling a lot of those open positions, so the agency often ended each fiscal year with a “pretty significant” amount of leftover funding.
“I don’t think (that’s) going to be the case this year,” Jones said. “That’s one of the areas that we need to get a tighter grip on, (is) understanding where we’re going to be at the end of this year with our ending fund balances and what this means for next year.”
Statistics
As of Monday, Lee said there were 121 inmates being held at the Fremont County Detention Center, including 17 that were booked in over the previous weekend.
The total includes 98 males, 28 females, and two juveniles, he said – noting that the female population has fallen since earlier this year when “we were holding upwards (of) 50 women in the county jail.”
“(That) was extremely difficult to do given the segregation that has to take place and the amount of room that we’ve got to move around to make that happen,” Lee said. “But those numbers are way down (now).”
The current inmate population includes 48 people who have already been sentenced – 34 males and 14 females – and 75 inmates who have yet to be adjudicated, Lee continued.
More than half of those pre-adjudicated inmates originated out of District Court, Lee said, while 41 percent came from Riverton Circuit Court, 6 percent came from Lander Circuit Court, and 2 percent from Riverton Municipal Court.
Over the last 55 days, Lee said his agency booked in 418 people, including 174 who were arrested by the Riverton Police Department, 129 from the FCSO, 73 from the Lander Police Department, 35 from the Wyoming Highway Patrol, four from the Shoshoni Police Department, two from the U.S. Marshal, and one from the Dubois Police Department.
So far this year, the FCSO has taken 1,180 calls for service, Lee said, and “our investigators continue to work on a multitude of cases countywide.”
One collaborative investigation involving local and federal law enforcement agencies – including the FCSO – resulted in the “recent apprehension of three different drug trafficking organization suspects here in Fremont County,” Lee said.
Two of the suspects are “Mexican nationals” who “were part of the Sinaloa cartel from Mexico” and “were living in the Kinnear area,” Lee said.
“Those two people have been apprehended safely without incident,” he said. “They were armed when they were apprehended, but they are in federal custody as of right now.”
The other suspect was a “local male subject in north Riverton” who “was part of the same … drug conspiracy,” Lee said.
Fremont County Search and Rescue has completed 20 missions so far this year compared to 24 at the same time last year, he added, and “we’ve had one fatality this fiscal year.”
For more information, call the FCSO at (307) 332-5611.