Kootenai County, sheriff and Hayden staff discuss tracking calls, billing cities for excess service

Kootenai County commissioners on June 16 discussed renewing the county’s contract with the City of Hayden and a possible mechanism to have cities reimburse the county when calls for service exceed what city residents already cover through county taxes.

Chair Ro Duncan introduced the item and said the county should produce reports for Hayden that break down calls and costs. "Growth should be paying for itself," Duncan said, arguing that cities expanding services should demonstrate capacity to cover public-safety costs beyond the county taxes their residents already pay.

County and sheriff’s office staff explored how to separate animal-control activity from patrol responses. A sheriff’s office representative said the records system (Spillman) includes "nature codes" that identify animal-related calls (barking dogs, loose animals, bites, kennel inspections), but added that deputies often handle animal calls after hours when animal-control staff are off duty. "We can break those out from just all of the other calls for service and say we're looking just for animal related calls," the representative said, while warning that capturing precise on-scene time for billing would require manual reconciliation against radio logs.

Staff and commissioners discussed policy options: limiting billing to citizen-initiated calls, excluding patrol-initiated investigatory stops unrelated to city activity, or building discrete, billable call types (for example, a "dump site check") that can be tracked monthly. County staff described ongoing conversations with Spillman vendors and said improvements are being pursued but that a fully automated, single-call capture is not yet reliable.

Sheriff’s office staff expressed conditional support for a billing arrangement tied to well-defined, codified call types, while flagging the labor cost of backfilling time records. Commissioners asked staff to meet with Hayden officials and sheriff’s staff to develop a workable reporting approach and a draft contract amendment or memorandum of understanding for future consideration.

Next steps noted in the meeting included scheduling a technical meeting with Hayden and county IT/reporting staff to refine codes and reporting outputs, and producing a monthly report that would be shared with the city as part of contract renewal discussions.