Gaining a $302,600 county appropriation to equip 27 new Chevrolet Tahoe patrol vans, Sheriff Mike Griffis reported after the commissioners’ Tuesday morning meeting that he had also been able recently to buy eight new V-6 Dodge Chargers for his investigators and civil service officers.
“The Chargers are all from donated money,” Griffis said. “We may have had more donations in the last five or six years than we have ever had.”
The sheriff said his next goal is to raise $350,000 to replace his armored truck because the one he has has been out of service for some time and would not be worth repairing.
Bought from Parkway Chevrolet in Tomball, north-northwest of Houston, the Tahoes were outfitted with laptop docking stations and input car adapters from GTS Technology Solutions of Austin, in-car cameras and AED First Response defibrillators from Axon Enterprise of Scottsdale, Ariz., and H2S Gas Monitors from Loaded Dice Safety of Odessa.
Griffis has said the Tahoes, financed with $2.5 million from the 1.25-cent rural sales tax that the voters approved in November 2018, would give him enough vehicles to let deputies to take them home, enhancing the law enforcement presence in their neighborhoods and helping the officers respond to emergencies much faster.
In other business, the commissioners formally adopted on a 4-1 vote a new redistricting map for themselves and the county’s four justices of the peace.
Having voted “no,” Precinct 4 Commissioner Armando S. Rodriguez explained that he preferred the rejected Plan A to the approved Plan B, both of which had been proffered by the Austin law firm of Bickerstaff, Heath, Delgado and Acosta to conform to U.S. Department of Justice guidelines.
Rodriguez told Judge Debi Hays and the other commissioners before Hays called for the vote that Plan A would have moved more minority citizens into Precincts 1 and 3 from his jurisdiction, which will have an 86-percent minority population with Plan B.
Effective Jan. 1, Precinct 4 and Commissioner Don Stringer’s Precinct 3 will expand west into Commissioner Mike Gardner’s Precinct 1 because Precinct 1 had become proportionately overpopulated since the 2010 U.S. Census, Bickerstaff, Heath attorney Claudia Russell told the court Oct. 26.
Stringer’s precinct currently has 32,457 people, Rodriguez’s 36,596 and Gardner’s 53,831. Precinct 2 Commissioner Greg Simmons represents 41,505, which is OK because that figure is within one percent of the DOJ-required 41,098, Russell said.
The county has grown from 137,083 to 164,399 residents since 2010 for a 19.9-percent increase, she said.
Precinct 1 includes western Odessa and the west side of the county, Precinct 2 northeast Odessa and Gardendale, Precinct 3 most of the city and Precinct 4 southeast Odessa and the county’s south side.
The court also:
- Accepted $23,000 from Barnhart Bolt & Special Fasteners for the sheriff’s office.
- Approved a ground lease contract between Permian Basin Supply and Blackwood Investment Properties at 194 Terminal Drive, at Odessa Airport-Schleymeyer Field.
