CLAREMORE — The Rogers County Sheriff’s Office may lose the ability to provide even basic services if it can’t hire more deputies this year, Sheriff Scott Walton told commissioners Monday.

In a letter protesting the county’s preliminary budget, Walton said the county in 2000 ranked last in the state for deputies per resident. And while the population has grown rapidly since then, his office’s manpower has not.

This year's preliminary budget proposes to reduce funding slightly for the sheriff’s office, which would make it impossible to hire more deputies, he said.

“The Rogers County Sheriff’s Office understands that each county office and each county officer has needs which require funding,” he said in the letter. “Still, the Sheriff’s Office is the only county agency which bears the burden of responding to incidents and emergencies which threaten lives and property.”

The office has been at or below minimum staff levels for the last decade, with only three to five deputies available to patrol at a time, he said. That’s in a county where more than 45,000 rural residents have no other police protection — and that number is growing.

“At current levels it is wholly unreasonable to expect the Sheriff’s Office to maintain a state of readiness,” the letter said. “Unless and until the fiscal resources allocated for the purposes of public safety are responsibly augmented to reflect the growth of the county and the deteriorated condition of staffing, the Sheriff’s Office will operate below standards and cannot meet the public’s expectation of service and protection.”

The office requested more than $2.2 million this year, up from $1.9 million in 2009. Commissioners on Monday reviewed a preliminary budget that offered less than $1.8 million.

Commissioners promised to meet with sheriff’s representatives before sending the budget to the excise board for approval. They said the allocation could change drastically by then.

The sheriff’s office would need enough to “dramatically increase” its workforce to meet police industry standards, Walton said. In light of the budget crunch, he said four new deputies will do for now. That would increase the patrol force by one deputy per shift.

Adding eight deputies would ensure that at least four are patrolling the county at any time, the letter added.

“I know these are lean times,” Walton told commissioners. “I’ll take whatever I can get. I’ll take 22 deputies if I can get them, and I’ll take four deputies if I can get them.”

In his letter, Walton called the need for new deputies “extraordinary,” saying the office is at dangerous staff levels.

“We are currently operating at manning levels which may likely not withstand the demands of public safety if adequate funding is not provided,” he said. “In the past year, the Sheriff’s Office has made personnel changes that were intended to augment the patrol force but these changes were, at best, unimpressive when compared to the overwhelming need to supplement the patrol force.”

The office also needs money to replace outdated vests warn by deputies and add mobile computers to its patrol cars, which would allow deputies to file reports in the field instead of filing them manually at the sheriff’s office building in Claremore.

Walton said mobile computers would be like having an extra deputy in the field because of the time they would save traveling.

A mobile computer “allows the deputy to be in service and able to respond to calls more quickly and efficiently than having to travel back and forth from the Sheriff’s Office,” according to Walton’s letter.

Another time saver, the fuel card system adopted last month, gives deputies unrestricted access to fuel cards that allow them to fuel their patrol cars at convenience stores rather than county fueling stations.

Anything that allows deputies to spend more time patrolling helps offset the office’s limited manpower, Walton said.

Rogers County has grown from 70,641 in the 2000 census to more than 85,000, according to latest estimates. However, sheriff’s office staffing levels have held steady since 2000, when a statewide study named Rogers County the worst in the state for sheriff’s deputy-to-population ratio, Walton’s letter said.

“That’s a disturbing piece to me,” District 2 Commissioner Mike Helm said. “That concerns me.”

Budget maker Melissa Anderson said the preliminary budget is just a starting point, but it was arranged to keep it balanced.

And while the sheriff’s office does need more deputies, the county can operate on the money it has, District 3 Commissioner Kirt Thacker said.

Although the proposed budget allocates less than last year for the sheriff’s office, that’s because the office used some of the money that was carried over from the previous year, a county clerk office official said.

District 1 Commissioner Dan DeLozier said he will meet with sheriff’s representatives about the budget in the next two weeks.

The commissioners will then revisit the budget.