Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 9, 1993 TAG: 9305070513
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
He was taking electrician's classes at the vocational school in neighboring Wise County when an uncle mentioned that the Virginia State Police might be hiring.
That piece of gossip led to a 32-year career as a state trooper, which ended with Phipps' retirement in August 1990.
The tall, deep-voiced Phipps - who has an affinity for Western wear - found himself back in law enforcement at the start of 1992 with his election as Montgomery County sheriff.
Phipps' first 16 months have been colored by controversy, but he claims he has a better office now than the one he inherited.
"You want life to be as mistake-free as it can possibly be, but it's not going to happen that way," Phipps said in a recent interview.
Phipps, 58, was reflecting on some of the tough problems he's faced during his first months in office.
Those included the state Compensation Board's decision to cut off funding for eight of his jailers, the indictments in September on conflict-of-interest charges of his chief deputy and an undercover investigator, and a confrontation with the town of Blacksburg over staffing for a lockup in Blacksburg.
Although he was a veteran of police work, Phipps had no management experience when he became sheriff. His last few years with the state police were spent overseeing garages licensed as state vehicle inspection stations.
In 1991, after having been retired from the state police for just over half a year, Phipps was drafted by the Montgomery County Republican Party to challenge Louis Barber, a Democrat who had been the county's sheriff for 14 years.
A political novice, Phipps surprisingly whipped Barber in 18 out of the county's 20 voting precincts, taking 54 percent of the vote.
Phipps waged an aggressive campaign against Barber and was helped by an organized campaign of rumors attacking the former sheriff's personal life. Phipps condemned the personal attacks and claimed he had no role in circulating the rumors.
The night of the election, the new sheriff credited public discontent with Barber for his victory.
The public now has had several months to assess the performance of the new sheriff. The months have seen changes in the department, but also have been filled with one public crisis after another.
In September a Montgomery County grand jury indicted Roy Bolen, Phipps' chief deputy, and undercover investigator Rickey Lynn Hodge. Phipps brought Bolen, a former state trooper like himself, into his office to run the department.
Phipps had entrusted Bolen with reviewing all purchases by his offices. Following Bolen's indictment, Phipps tightened purchasing procedures.
The charges against Bolen were related to the repair of sheriff's office vehicles at a garage Bolen owned. Phipps fired Bolen Sept. 30, the day he was indicted.
But Bolen was acquitted of the charges against him in a nonjury trial in Montgomery County Circuit Court on April 23.
Bolen escaped conviction by claiming he was not familiar with terms of the state's conflict-of-interest law. The law allows public officials to claim ignorance as a defense.
Bolen has said he may sue Phipps over his firing.
Hodge, 33, was charged with obtaining money under false pretenses when he sold a car in which he owned an interest to the county for undercover use.
He pleaded guilty in December to a lesser misdemeanor charge of interfering with the property rights of the Board of Supervisors. He was given probation and a suspended one-year jail term and resigned rather than accept reassignment.
Phipps early in his term also confronted the prospect of losing nearly one-fourth of his 35-employee jail staff. The state Compensation Board eliminated funding for eight jailers last July 1.
The eight were among 12 jail jobs the state had agreed years ago to fund on an emergency basis to cope with jail overcrowding. But last year the Compensation Board looked at the number of inmates in the Montgomery jail compared with other jurisdictions and concluded the positions were more needed elsewhere in the state.
In July, the Board of Supervisors agreed to continue paying the jailers' salaries through the end of the year, while Phipps challenged the state's decision.
The challenge resulted in a settlement in which the state agreed to a lump-sum payment of $56,000 to the county but rejected continued funding of the jailers. The county now is paying the salaries of three of the jailers to help keep a jail annex in Blacksburg open through Oct. 1.
At the time the state said it was cutting off the money for the extra jailers, Phipps and others warned that their loss could mean an end to the use of jail labor on civic projects and an end to rehabilitation programs for prisoners such as Alcoholics Anonymous and GED courses.
Phipps said, however, that those programs are continuing despite the cutback in state funding.
Jail occupancy figures compiled by the state Department of Corrections show that the number of prisoners kept in Montgomery County dropped from 1990 to 1992. The county jail held 88 prisoners in January 1990 and 101 in July 1990, compared with 67 and 97 in the same months of 1992.
What the figures don't reflect, according to the county's chief jailer, Capt. George Keyes, is that in 1990 many of the prisoners were from outside Montgomery County, which is no longer the case.
In the 1990-91 fiscal year, the county made $255,000 by keeping out-of-county prisoners. Through March in the current fiscal year, the county had collected only $21,000 from housing outside prisoners.
The loss of other localities' prisoners, coupled with a cutback in state support, means the sheriff's budget for next year will require roughly a 100 percent increase in local taxpayer support.
Phipps questioned the county's policy of taking in outside prisoners during his election campaign, but the decline in those prisoners and accompanying revenue loss for the county is not the result of a policy change, Keyes said.
The decline is due to such factors as Pulaski County making arrangements to keep its own female prisoners, and Fairfax County and Washington making more room for their own prisoners at home.
Besides having to manage the same number of prisoners with fewer jailers, their loss created another big problem for Phipps' administration. It has strained the relationship between Phipps' office and the police department in Blacksburg, the county's largest community.
Phipps said he inherited this problem from Barber.
In 1991, the former sheriff and the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors signed a contract with Blacksburg to staff a new prisoner lockup next to the Blacksburg Police Department that the county and town had spent several thousand dollars to build and equip.
At the time the original contract was signed, the supervisors were very happy to be able to provide the county's largest community with the service, Barber recalled. The money the county spent to equip the annex came entirely from money raised through boarding of prisoners, he said.
The jail annex has a closed-circuit television system that enables magistrates in Christiansburg to process the paperwork for prisoners in Blacksburg. Having the lockup available in Blacksburg saved the town thousands of dollars in transportation and other costs. It also provided a convenient place for lawyers and citizens in the Blacksburg area to distribute court documents.
But last year Phipps and the county gave Blacksburg the required one-year's notice to terminate the county's contract to provide jailers for the lockup, effective this Oct. 1. The county supervisors agreed to pick up the salary of three jailers until the contract expires.
In November, Blacksburg officials felt they had worked out an agreeable compromise. They thought they had agreed on a new contract with Phipps to staff the lockup from 4 p.m. on Thursdays through 8 a.m. on Sundays.
Recently, Phipps has been staffing the lockup during essentially the same weekend hours, but he said his staff shortage is so critical that illness or injury to jailers could cause him serious problems.
Phipps said he didn't sign the new contract because he didn't want to be locked into providing jailers if he didn't have them to spare.
He and the county supervisors need to sit down with the Blacksburg Town Council and Police Chief Don Carey to decide what can be done, Phipps said.
But communication between the county and town has not been good since the county rejected the November contract. Until two weeks ago, Phipps had not talked with Carey about the lockup contract since November, the chief said.
It's difficult to find someone to comment on how a new sheriff is doing on the job. Those most familiar with the sheriff's performance are people who are reluctant to comment because they work with the sheriff on a regular basis.
Blacksburg's Carey will say only that he intends to cooperate with the sheriff in every way.
Barber, who certainly might have his own personal reasons to be critical of Phipps, observed that the new sheriff had managed in 16 months to destroy an excellent working relationship between the sheriff's office and Blacksburg Police Department.
Barber, now an employee of the Virginia Beach Sheriff's Office, said from what he's heard, the public is growing unhappy with his successor.
"Based on my limited knowledge," Barber said, "in 32 months someone is going to have one hell of a mess to straighten out."
He said Phipps' continuing criticism of his former administration is unfounded.
During his election campaign, Phipps promised to: establish a citizens' committee to advise the sheriff's department; study the office's employees and equipment to see if it was being used efficiently; improve employee morale and working conditions; and improve cooperation with other law enforcement agencies.
A citizens' advisory committee has been named, although it's met only once since Phipps took office. Phipps said he looks to members of the committee to alert him to possible criminal activity, such as drug dealing.
Members of the 11-member committee, many of whom are long-time friends of Phipps, are satisfied with the sheriff's performance and say his problems have not shaken their confidence in him.
Some committee members say they've noticed an increase in the number of patrols by deputies in their parts of the county since Phipps took office.
"He's getting his feet on the ground better now," committee member William Gibson of Christiansburg says. Committee member Alfred Perdue of the Lusters Gate community said people who did not support Phipps in the election have told him since then that they think the sheriff is doing an outstanding job.
The efficiency study Phipps proposed during the election campaign has not been done. But Phipps said he has been able to cut down on the use of some sheriff's office vehicles.
County records show that in March 1991, Barber's last year in office, the sheriff's office had 53 vehicles or various types; and on March 26 of this year, the sheriff's office still had 53 vehicles.
Phipps said, however, that five vehicles have been taken out of service since March, leaving the department with two spare patrol vehicles to fall back on in emergencies.
As far as other police agencies, Phipps said he gets along well with the state police and the Christiansburg Police Department. And despite the problem with the Blacksburg jail annex, he and Blacksburg Chief Carey still communicate, Phipps said.
Despite the crises occupying his time, Phipps said the sheriff's office has improved under his leadership.
For instance, he said, when he first came into office he found a backlog of unserved warrants, most of them for bad checks and some 3 or 4 years old. "We went to work on those immediately," he said.
During the campaign, Phipps accused Barber's office of not properly following up on citizens' complaints. Phipps said recently it appears that the problem was that Barber's deputies didn't follow up on complaints after making an initial response. The operation is more efficient now, he said.
Barber said he has no knowledge of any complaints going unanswered during his tenure.
As far as the warrants are concerned, Barber said there always is a large number of outstanding bad-check warrants because the people who they were issued for cannot be found. About one-third of the county's population - Virginia Tech students - are transients, Barber said.
It was his regular practice to go to the court once or twice a year to have outstanding warrants purged from the files, Barber said.
Since he took office, criminal investigations have improved, Phipps claimed. A female investigator has been added to the force to handle domestic-abuse cases.
Additionally, Phipps said, the sheriff's office has created a special-response team, sometimes known as a SWAT team, and he has been working to equip all of his officers with new .40 calibre semiautomatic pistols, Phipps said.
Phipps recently decided to move his office's training from the Cardinal Police Academy in Salem to the New River Police Academy in Dublin, a move that Phipps said should save the county in travel and wages. Deputies and jailers are required to be trained at the beginning of their jobs and to have 40 hours of retraining every year afterwards.
According to Director Bill Mayo, Cardinal has the lowest tuition costs in the state. The New River academy has agreed to provide the training for the same annual fee during the first year, Phipps said.
His office's public relations has improved, too, Phipps said. As an example, he cited a program in which the office makes regular checks with elderly residents to see if they are having any special problems.
"I feel like the morale in the sheriff's department has improved very much," Phipps said.
Phipps believes in delegating authority to his supervisors. "We have some good, level-headed supervisors," he said.
"I'm fortunate that the Montgomery County sheriff's office has some excellent people," he said. "By in large, they've done a real good job."
Phipps, whose term runs through Dec. 31, 1995, lives in Blacksburg with his wife, Sylvia. The couple has two grown sons.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB