What Dane County needs vs. what Sheriff Barrett wants

Dane County went into the 2026 budget cycle having to reconcile a $31-million deficit, so County Executive Melissa Agard asked all departments to submit budget requests with a 4% reduction. And most of the departments did. And yet the Dane County Sheriff’s Office (DCSO) did not, even though it had more than two dozen vacant positions.

Tone Madison reached out to the Dane County Sheriff’s Office for comment, but no one was available due to the Veteran’s Day holiday. In an email to Tone Madison, Agard states DCSO “did make reductions in several areas and proposed bringing in new revenue to help fill in some gaps.” 

The County Executive is not beholden to department budget requests and can make changes for their proposed budget. Agard told Tone Madison that her “budget allocated three less [vacant] positions for the sheriff’s office, but did not include reducing the number of deputy positions.” 

“I left the unfilled deputy positions in place to give the Dane County Sheriff[‘s] Office the flexibility to get fully staffed up when the new jail opens without sacrificing the public safety needs of rural communities in Dane County or driving overtime costs for the Sheriff Office even higher,” Agard writes. “Hiring deputy positions takes longer than most other positions due to the training required so the vacancy rate fluctuates. The funding in the Sheriff’s budget attached to the vacant positions does get used to cover the overtime that results from vacant positions, so using that funding elsewhere was not an option considered.”

In 2025, DCSO requested $112,202,983; then-Dane County interim executive Jamie Kuhn’s budget recommended DCSO receive $112,758,883, and the final adopted budget allocated $112,527,161. For 2026, DCSO actually requested 3.5% more, $116,559,483; Agard’s proposed budget for DCSO was $116,163,683.

“This isn’t the first County Executive who has sort of given the sheriff, I think, a pass on budget reductions,” says Dane County Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner. “And I don’t think Kalvin Barrett’s the first sheriff to not comply with a reduction target.”

By contrast, the Department of Human Services requested $279,109,475 for 2026, and the County Executive’s budget allocated $273,936,394. That’s lower than the  $275,912,024 that Human Services was allocated in the 2025 adopted budget. 

Dane County Supervisor Yogesh Chawla told Tone Madison that, yes, adapting to a $31-million deficit is challenging, but the cuts to Human Services were particularly concerning at the present moment.

“With everything we’re seeing at the federal level, and you know, with what’s happening with SNAP benefits and the collapse of Medicaid, we felt it was important to really make sure that we weren’t having a disproportionate cut to those human services providers,” Chawla says.

For example, the County Board restored funding for an immigration affairs social worker. “With everything that’s happening with ICE and with the erosion of constitutional rights across the country, we felt like that position was critical to have in the budget,” Chawla says.

After hearing testimony from dozens of Dane County residents and representatives of community nonprofits that provide human services, the board also voted to restore 3% of the 4% cut in funding the county offers to nonprofits that provide human services. The board also allocated more funds for homelessness services (particularly emergency shelters so people don’t freeze to death), detox services, a position at the Aging and Disability Resource Center, and a county-wide affordable housing coordinator. 

One way the County Board decided to balance those investments was to freeze 20 of the 28 open DCSO positions for one year—a compromise from the initial proposal to cut those open positions entirely. Barrett wasn’t having it and went on the offensive against the initial proposal to cut the positions and the proposal to freeze them. 

“It really was like an all-out PR blitz from the Sheriff’s Office. It seems sort of an unprecedented level of media effort on the Sheriff’s Office behalf,” Wegleitner says. “I don’t have my own press secretary or staff, right, like that. I have a different, full-time job that I have to do during the day, and then I do work for the county on the county board, right? So it can be hard to sort of keep up with some of that media effort.”

Barrett claimed that cutting the open positions would affect response times, even though the cuts were to unfilled positions. In a November 5 Facebook video, Barrett stated that he did not see the proposal to freeze the positions as a compromise, and that the proposal would affect DCSO’s ability to operate the new jail scheduled to open in 2027. 

“We want to emphasize that this won’t take one sheriff off the street, this won’t take one sheriff deputy out of the jail, and it won’t take one sheriff deputy out of rural communities either,” Chawla says. “That was the balance that we struck, and there were some very important things that we had to do.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, Agard has not informed the board nor the public of what she will do with the budget passed by the board. She could pass it in full, veto some line items, or veto the budget as a whole. If Agard sides with DCSO, it would be more of the same, but unfortunately at an unprecedented time—Dane County is seeing a rise in homelessness, food scarcity, lack of access to healthcare (especially mental healthcare), and other services that would shore up our society’s marginalized at the hands of an uncaring, cruel administration. The cuts Agard initially proposed played into those hands and would have had devastating consequences. Let’s hope she recognizes that Dane County desperately needs shelter, food, healthcare, and support for its most vulnerable. The last thing we need is to spend millions of dollars on more cops to throw people in cages.