The following response given by Sheriff Chad Anderson following the release of the state auditor's report on Wednesday
"To the citizens of Bates County, I’m here today to address the recent Audit report from the Missouri state auditors office to begin with, I want to acknowledge that this was caused by a whistleblower complaint almost 3 years ago. My office has fully complied with every request from the auditors throughout this process, which again has taken almost 3 years of our time at the sheriffs office.
It is important for the community to understand that an audit report is only an opinion, it is not legal advice and they are prohibited from providing legal advice to counties. While I do not contest the expenditures mentioned in the report, I strongly contest their characterization of those funds as wasteful. To be clear the findings failed to reveal a single violation of the law.
I would like to address a few specific findings regarding specialized divisions within the sheriffs office. As sheriff, I have the statutory authority to create any division within my agency that I see fit; those would include canine division, traffic control, SWAT search and rescue narcotics divisions, but seemingly what is at hand here is the division I created in 2020 called the 'mounted patrol' where the auditor fails to acknowledge that the Sheriff's Office has the authority to create such groups.
The auditor claims the mounted patrol lacks a clear law-enforcement purpose, and I strongly disagree with that characterization. This unit has successfully conducted search and rescue missions for injured citizens, assisted with animals loose on the highway, and has even been requested by the Kansas City Police Department for crowd control at the now passed World Cup soccer competitions. Use of horses at community event keeps both the animal and riders trained and ready for real world emergencies and the other thing we have noticed, is that the kids in our community want to pet a horse, they come up and talk to the officers while building relationships and it’s one of the best community policing tools I have. Second, the report criticizes expenditures from our volunteer sheriff posse over the four year audit.
We spent just over $16,000 on equipment with uniforms, training, and much needed safety tools. One of the training classes that has been contested is a class called Stop the Bleed, so that when they respond to emergencies, they are now trained and equipped to stop the bleed and save a life. If they’re gonna act on behalf of the sheriffs office, we are obligated to train them and equip them for the daily duties that they’re gonna do, and since 2009 the posse has been instrumental providing massive man power during major emergencies. Those include tornadoes cleanup, 30 person search of a 1400 acre area, and providing much needed staff support for the mass casually event where a plane crash killed people 12 people. Posse members were called in to help comfort and provide families of those victims the support they needed while allowing the sheriffs office and their deputies to remain on scene for four straight days helping with the recovery efforts and the investigation of the federal agencies. That cost, $16,000, is a fraction of hiring one single deputy.
The Auditor also questions $28,000 spent on community events like family fun days and the festival we attended where we participated in building essential relationships with our community and our citizens. Furthermore, meeting their requirements for the community policing grant or the community policing portion of the Blue Shield grant that the governor himself has issued, part of that requirement was that we have community policing be portion of what we do; and because of that we have received $79,000 in Blue Shield grant money to date.
Regarding donations to third parties totaling $23,268, the report buries the fact that these funds went to Bates County youth program programs like little league football, little league baseball, scouts, little league basketball, the youth fair board, and places like the children center. Providing financial support to these programs, we are letting 'at risk' youth participate in a program they may not have been able to afford prior to our donations. I have provided the auditor with three separate legal opinions, confirming that these donations fall under the court recognized public use doctrine and are entirely within the law.
The auditor also criticizes $4,356 spent on our banquet/Christmas dinner over the span of four years. These Christmas dinners and banquets were held to recognize the heroics of my staff, to show appreciation for their service to our community. The banquets help with retention. They help with morale, and they have merit. These events are standard in law-enforcement agencies across the country. The state of Missouri has their own awards banquet. The governor gives out merit awards and heroic awards so there’s no reason why the sheriffs office in Bates County can’t either. There are common amongst elected officials here in Bates County, but I find no report of any other elected official being criticized for having an award banquet or Christmas party - only the sheriff's office.
Finally the auditor suggests we reduce our cash reserve that we have built up at the Sheriffs office. Maintaining roughly 4 months of operating cash is responsible budgeting and suggesting we eliminate the tax for law enforcement in effect is a call to defund law-enforcement. The law-enforcement tax they recommend cutting does not even fund the sheriffs office. We receive 100% of our budget from contract housing.
This tax passed in 1988, was intended to fund the sheriffs office, the prosecutor’s office, and the juvenile office. That’s what the ballot wording said, and today the sheriffs office receives zero of that tax dollars. We've been forced to generate our own revenue to fully fund the sheriff's office and the coroner's office because this tax does not create enough revenue to fund all of it.
We do not take any money out of general revenue. We’ve been able to help build that reserve up as well, so the auditor criticizes expenditures, but on the other hand says we have too much money, I’m not trying to minimize the auditors findings, but to put it in perspective, we’re talking about expenditures over the audit period that equal less than 1.1%- actually, it’s .84% of the sheriffs office budget over four years audit period. The report also suggested that if a specialized unit is not used daily, then it’s wasteful.
I’m not sure how much experience the auditor himself or his staff have in public safety, but I will continue to continue to equip, train and prepare my staff to respond to the needs of bates county citizens. We will not wait four hours relying on state agencies to respond with equipment simply because the auditor failed to see the value in what we have built here.
I will quote the auditor in her own words. "It does not appear necessary for the taxpayer to continuously fund a private entity (the posse) for hypothetical future events without an agreement identifying what the actual benefit to the county is". Ladies and gentlemen, my job in law-enforcement is exactly to do that. It is to train, to prepare, and to plan for hypothetical situations. The time to be prepared isn’t when a major incident occurs. If that is the case, then way too much of our state tax dollars has been spent preparing for FIFA soccer in Kansas City requiring many thousands, if not millions, of of your tax dollars.
My first priority is the safety of our citizens. I have remained transparent with you throughout this entire process. We have been transparent in our expenditures as they occur in real time through press releases. Tomorrow, the staff of the Bates County sheriffs office will continue to show up. We’re going to continue to answer your calls and we will continue to serve you as we have in the last 17 years. I truly appreciate your support."
-Bates County Sheriff, Chad Anderson
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