DCSO finds reimbursement for occupation prices

The Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office needs to have the money it spent while reacting to the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County compensated by the government.

Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office’s expenditures total $169,505.06, in accordance to records given to The Bulletin by the county’s legal counsel previous week in response to an April 28 records appeal. The bulk of those expenditures are personnel prices.

Deschutes County sheriff’s deputies spent 1,790 hours of overtime responding to the forty-one day occupation, in accordance to county records.

The group of persons who occupied the refuge was previously protesting the imprisonment of Harney County rancher Dwight Hammond and his son, and Steven Hammond, in a federal arson case; the occupation came to depict the tension and anxiety between federal land managers and independent ranchers and landowners throughout the West.

The sheriff’s office was believed to be one of the lead agencies inquiring the fatal shooting in the month of January of refuge occupier LaVoy Finicum by Oregon State Police.

It spent merely over $2,000 towing Finicum’s vehicle to the Oregon State Police yard in Bend, and other expenses involved lodging and meals for deputies.

A reimbursement appeal was made to the state in the month of mid-April for a good chunk of the total prices: $116,381.77.

Deschutes County sheriff’s Legal Counsel Darryl Nakahira wrote in an email Friday that the assumptions made earlier this spring were preliminary, therefore the disparity between the total prices and those reported to the state earlier.