DN Editorial: Sheriff Office fix: Decades late

THE GOOD NEWS: A new advisory board will oversee the Sheriff's Office and impose financial controls and bring accountability to an office that has been sorely lacking in both for decades.

The bad news: It has taken decades of scathing controller reports on the financial ineptitude of the Sheriff's Office to finally impose this common-sense solution.

A review of controller's reports dating from the 1980s is a depressing highlight reel of missing money, lax controls and sloppy bookkeeping. That record culminated in Controller Alan Butkovitz calling for a forensic audit in 2010 to help account for a missing $53 million in accounts. Last month, the U.S. Attorney's Office got into the act, and subpoenaed documents from the Sheriff's Office.

Under the arrangement hammered out by the Mayor's Office, many of the sheriff's big financial decisions will now require the approval of other city officials, including Finance Director Rob Dubow, who will name the sheriff's interim budget director. The sheriff will follow city financial rules and regulations that it previously did not. The court system will provide oversight of sheriff sales, though the Sheriff's Office will control the sales of foreclosed properties; those sales restart this week.

Why has it taken decades to fix this? For one thing, the Sheriff's Office is an elected office. This gave it a level of independence and was accountable only to voters - at least those voters who managed to get out of the house to pull the lever. So a large part of the blame is on us, the electorate: for not being more aware of the financial stakes attached to this office, and for continuing to elect someone despite the well-documented problems of the office. Abolishing the sheriff's job as an elected office is one way to counter those problems.

But that too is only a partial solution; after all, other troubled boards and agencies lack accountability for other reasons. For example, the PHA board, the DRPA and the BRT are all appointed by other elected officials, which not only creates an arm's-length distance that muffles accountability, but disperses responsibility among many parties and many officials.

The new advisory board is encouraging progress. More discouraging is our ability to tolerate the kind of problems that plagued the Sheriff's Office for so long. *