It’s been years since I covered the Seneca County Board of Supervisors as a beat reporter, but an oddly familiar debate is playing out again. This time over contract negotiations between the sheriff’s department’s PBA and county leaders. It boils down to what kind of community people want and what they’re willing to pay for it.
For months, deputies have been working without a contract. They’re short-staffed, covering mandatory overtime, and watching colleagues walk away for jobs in other departments that pay tens of thousands more. The union representing them says it’s simple: Seneca County’s pay scale is broken. Deputies make anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 less than officers in nearby departments, and $50,000 less than state troopers doing the same work.
In other words, Seneca County has become a training ground. The county invests in recruits, pays for their academy training, provides equipment, and then they leave for better-paying jobs in neighboring communities.
To put it more bluntly: That means taxpayers are subsidizing the personnel budgets of surrounding counties.
County leaders acknowledge the problem but insist their hands are tied. In a recent statement, Board of Supervisors Chairman Michael Enslow said deputies already received an average 40% raise in the last contract, and that the union’s current proposal — about a 37% increase over three years — would cost nearly $1.9 million. The county pays 80% to 85% of deputies’ health insurance premiums, he noted, and has been drawing from reserves just to keep property tax increases under 10%. “We have to balance fairness to our workforce with fairness to our taxpayers,” he said.
That sounds reasonable — until you realize the “fairness” argument is built on decades of underpayment. For years, the county has been warned this would happen. Former sheriffs, including Tom Fox, Gary Sullivan, and Tim Luce, have all said the same thing: Seneca County cannot retain deputies because it refuses to pay competitive wages.
The result is predictable. You get turnover, spiraling overtime, and burnout among those who stay.
The PBA says the office is down four full-time positions, leaving fewer school resource officers, no dedicated narcotics investigator, and slower response times. And this is after the Sheriff’s Office returned $650,000 to the county’s general fund last year. Money that could have gone toward pay parity.
This is where the broader point comes in: High-quality services cost money.
You can’t have it both ways. Residents can’t demand more police presence, faster response times, and “safer communities” while simultaneously expecting taxes to stay flat forever.
Maybe giving deputies a raise will eventually require higher taxes to sustain it. Fine. That’s what leadership is for — to forecast, to plan, to make tough decisions in public view. But kicking the can down the road, again, isn’t leadership. It’s avoidance.
And let’s be honest about what the “keep taxes low” mindset has really produced. Nearly every Upstate county has lost population over the past two decades. Many have shrunk by 10% or more. Yet their governments are still trying to maintain service levels built for a time when there were more people (and tax revenue!) to support them. The result is thinner staffing, aging equipment, slower responses, and exhausted workers. Public safety doesn’t scale down neatly with population loss. In fact, it often moves the other direction.
As local economies become less diverse and more reliant on low-wage service jobs, the challenges that drive demand for public safety — poverty, addiction, mental health, and domestic violence — only grow. Deputies and officers are now expected to be first responders, social workers, and mediators, often all in the same shift. That work doesn’t get easier when you pay less. It just gets harder to find people willing to do it.
The truth is uncomfortable as much as it is straightforward: People can’t stop thinking about public safety when they talk about property taxes. Just like they can’t stop thinking about taxes when they talk about public safety. Those two realities are intertwined. You pay for what you value.
If Seneca County truly values its deputies — and by extension, the safety and stability of its communities — then it needs to pay them what the market demands. If not, the Board of Supervisors should be honest about what the alternative looks like long-term. Fewer deputies, slower responses, and a continued cycle of attrition that leaves residents less protected.
That’s the conversation Seneca County’s leaders need to have with taxpayers — not next year, not in the next budget cycle, but now. Either invest in the people who protect you, or admit you’re willing to live with less protection in exchange for lower taxes.
You can’t have it both ways.
