Alamance County’s sheriff had both good news and bad news to report to the county’s board of commissioners when he presented them with a roundup of his agency’s latest activities on Monday.
In this briefing, which focused on developments from 2024, sheriff Terry Johnson acknowledged that his agency has begun to emerge from a staffing crisis that had prompted him to propose signing bonuses for new jailers and patrol deputies nearly a year ago.
The commissioners waited until July before they allowed Johnson to issue 10 of these $10,000 inducements on the condition that the recipients remain in the sheriff’s employ for at least 22 months. They went on to authorize more of these bonuses in batches of 10 until the county’s administrators revealed that they had run out of “lapsed” salaries to cover the payouts earlier this year…