The Morgan County Board of Commissioners received roughly $1.1 million in budget requests for new employee positions during a FY26 budget work session held April 22.
The budget requests account for 14 positions across county departments, including an administrative training captain for Morgan County Fire Rescue, an attendant to manage recycling facilities, an IT position, an Extension position, a part-time tag clerk for the tax commissioner’s office, and programming and maintenance positions to help run the new recreation facility off Old Buckhead Road.
Of the 14 positions, nine were requested by the Morgan County Sheriff’s Office. Sheriff Tyler Hooks and Chief Deputy Jason Welch presented a request for four additional uniform patrol corporals, four additional jail corporals, and a truck traffic deputy.
Welch stressed the need for the additional positions, saying the sheriff’s office hasn’t been able to keep up with the county’s growing population. He said the ratio of police officers to residents in the county has been trending downwards.
“Morgan County is rapidly growing; it ranks 29th out of 159 counties for population growth,” Welch said. “The population in 2005 was 16,925. Now, the population is at 21,460. This has been an ongoing issue. These requested positions have been needed, from my calculations at looking at this, for nearly a decade.
“Many of y’all have seen these struggles that we’re facing, and I have been told that previously this had been addressed by our predecessors,” Welsh told the commissioners. “This is a decaying tooth. We need to perform the necessary requirements that fix it because it’s never going to get better.”
District 3 Commissioner Ben Riden questioned the need for all nine positions and asked which positions were most needed.
“There’s aspirational desires, there’s what you can get by with, and then there’s what we can afford,” he said. “You may have to incrementally get to where you want to go. You’re not going to get there all at once … I don’t know how we can fund all these positions that people are asking for. I would say I presented my most pressing needs, and respectfully, it’s the commissioners’ jobs to decide on what those needs are,” Welch said. “I can’t choose between [the positions].”
“We’re not asking for wants; we’re asking for necessities,” Hooks added.
The county will consider the requests as it prepares the FY26 budget, which begins on July 1.