AUBURN — Androscoggin County Sheriff Guy Desjardins has proposed a budget that would raise 2014 spending within his department by merely $169, a difference of 0.008 percent.
“I was just trying to keep the numbers down,” Desjardins said Thursday. “It’s tough for everybody.”
In 2013, the county budgeted $2,047,688. His 2014 budget, proposed to county commissioners Wednesday, would raise spending to $2,047,857.
The spending package does not include the cost of operating the Androscoggin County Jail, which is set by commissioners but must be approved by the Maine Board of Corrections. The budget includes the cost of dispatching, civic process serving and operating the countywide patrol.
Budgeted expenses for the coming year include plans to buy a pair of vehicles.
However, it does not include another big-ticket expense: computers.
Recently, the department discovered that many of the extra-rugged laptops used in cruisers, Panasonic Toughbook computers, will have to be replaced. They’re at least six years old and soon will be running an old version of Windows software that will no longer be updated to run securely, said Capt. Raymond Lafrance, who runs the department’s patrol division.
The cost of each replacement laptop is about $4,000, Lafrance said. The total cost, when mounting equipment and software costs are added, will likely reach $70,000.
“We’re looking at financing that over a four-year period,” he said.
Unlike consumer computers, these are made to resist significant shocks and drastic changes in temperature.
“They’ve got to be tough for the environment they are forced to work in,” he said.
The department plans to submit a separate request for the computers at a later date, Desjardins said.
As it now stands, the patrol division’s budget is proposed to increase by 6.2 percent, from $1.35 million this year to $1.44 million in 2014.
The civil division budget is slated to drop from $171,390 this year to $169,903, a 0.8 percent decline. The communications budget is to drop from $520,789 to $438, 534, or 15.7 percent.
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