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The Door County Jail is operating under emergency staffing rules, effective Oct. 8, with 16 employees currently working in the jail when 22 are needed to cover shifts safely and effectively, Sheriff Tammy Sternard said.
Emergency staffing procedures will continue until enough staff are hired and trained to run the jail effectively, she said.
The jail staffing shortage has been an ongoing issue before reaching the most recent point, and it contributed to heavy overtime costs and declining morale among jail staff, according to the Door County Deputy Sheriff’s Association. The association cited those problems, among other concerns unrelated to the jail, in its June vote of no confidence in Sternard.
A vote of no confidence is a significant step for a union association, according to experts in labor relations. Such votes are often a last resort when efforts to address workplace concerns have failed, said Jim Palmer, president of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, which represents more than 300 law enforcement unions statewide.
Sternard disputed the association’s depiction of her leadership and said she and county administration have been trying to recruit more staff and reduce overtime and workload pressure in the jail.
The association’s resolution cited ongoing staffing shortages, a two-male minimum staffing policy, excessive overtime, and a general lack of support as conditions contributing to a general loss of trust in Sternard as sheriff.
How serious is the jail problem?
While 22 employees is the minimum number of filled positions needed for safe and effective jail operations, 24 employees in the jail are optimal for reducing overtime and workloads, Sternard stated in staffing reports from 2023 to 2025.
The county has authorized 26 positions in the jail, including a jail lieutenant, three sergeants, 19 full-time deputies, two court security deputies and one administrative assistant.
With the jail currently under emergency staffing rules, the sheriff is allowed to go outside the bargaining unit contract to make sure the jail is staffed adequately. This means she does not have to abide by specific rules in the contract regarding how overtime is assigned and other staffing procedures.
During the week of Oct. 8, Sternard met with union and jail division representatives to discuss actions related to the emergency staffing situation, she said.
The temporary plan is to allow non-security deputies to work overtime shifts in the jail under specific conditions and operational needs during the declared emergency schedule, she said.
Chief Deputy Kyle Veeser, Sternard’s current second-in-command in the Sheriff’s Office, was the jail lieutenant from 2019 until previous Chief Deputy Pat McCarty retired in 2025. Veeser has worked for the Sheriff’s Office for about 20 years. The jail has not been fully staffed since 2019, but this is the worst shape it has been in, Veeser said.
When there are staff or shift vacancies, existing jail deputies are given overtime. The highest overtime spending for all state employees is in corrections – 67% of all the overtime in the state was spent on the Department of Corrections in 2024.
County jails collect data separately from the state system, and Door County shows high numbers of overtime hours and spending over the last few years.
In Door County, from January 2023 to Sept. 30, 2026, there were 14,937.75 hours of jail staff overtime, totaling $737,192.35 in costs.
The Door County Jail requires a minimum of four deputies working at all times, and the jail uses an 8-hour overlapping shift schedule, according to sheriff staffing reports. Due to current staffing levels, any time one individual is off for any reason, it creates overtime.
Corrections jobs are hard to fill and to keep filled. Wisconsin state corrections facilities had an 11% turnover rate in 2024, according to Safe Inside, a national project focused on corrections research.
Twenty-nine security deputies either retired or resigned from the Door County Jail between January 2023 and Sept. 30, 2026, according to staffing reports. Of the 29, five retired. Of those who resigned, 12 cited overtime hours as the reason, and 13 cited working shift hours/time away from family. Resigning security deputies were allowed to choose more than one reason for leaving in exit surveys, according to the report.
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Three of the resigning deputies cited a “negative work environment” as one of their reported reasons for leaving.
Not only have overtime needs increased, but changes in the jail environment have increased the workload, Sternard wrote in her 2025 report. Inmate mental health issues and alcohol and/or drug withdrawals are to blame, she said, as both scenarios require more one-on-one staff attention, leaving remaining staff to deal with a larger number of inmates than they should be.
The number of incarcerated people in Door County with mental health and/or substance use disorders has increased in the last decade, even as the number of incarcerated people overall has not significantly changed.
In consultant interviews with jail deputies in 2019, 100% said they frequently interact with people with mental health concerns and with substance abuse concerns.
By comparison, 85% of patrol deputies told consultants they frequently interact with people with mental health concerns, and 82% said the same for people with substance abuse concerns.
Another factor that contributes to high overtime and low morale, according to the vote of no-confidence resolution, is a two-male minimum policy in place at the Door County Jail. Male officers are required on every shift, regardless of overall staffing numbers, and vacancies or absences can lead to overtime just to reach the minimum.
Wisconsin statute requires at least one person on duty of the same sex as incarcerated people who is responsible for the “custody, cleanliness, food and care” of inmates.
Door County has enforced a stricter local policy that there must be two male officers on duty at any given time, a measure to ensure better safety for jail employees and inmates, according to Sternard. Male inmates almost always substantially outnumber female inmates, she added.
What has been tried, and what has not
The county has tried to solve its staffing shortage and excessive overtime with various approaches, according to County Corporation Counsel Sean Donohue. Some of them have been accepted by the association, while others have not.
According to staffing reports, Sternard and county administration have made attempts to reduce the overtime burden and workload, including by adding one more authorized full-time deputy position last year and eliminating part-time positions as they became more difficult to fill.
Most recently, county leadership and Sternard implemented a rotating overtime system so it was not all falling on the deputies with less seniority, Donohue said.
More senior deputies had the ability to refuse overtime, he said, and it kept falling on the more junior members of the jail staff.
“They were receiving so much overtime, they were burning out,” according to Donohue.
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Recommendations to move jail staff to a 12-hour shift schedule have been made several times over the years, according to staffing reports. A $40,000 staffing and operations analysis by McGrath Consulting Group was conducted in 2020. The study also recommended the 12-hour shift schedule.
“It (would have) allowed for better staffing and work-life balance,” Donohue said. “It was not a big cost savings to the county, rather it was an expense. But the union did not want it.”
With a 12-hour schedule, called a Pitman Schedule, employees work two or three days and then have two or three days off. The schedule proposed for Door County would allow employees to have an average of 15 days off each month, versus eight days in a typical schedule. Currently, most Sheriff’s Office employees work a regular eight-hour shift schedule with six days on and three days off.
A 12-hour schedule has become the norm in many jails, Veeser said.
The union has consistently rejected a 12-hour shift schedule, including during the most recent collective bargaining process. Union representatives did not respond to requests for comment on this issue.
The process for the 2025-27 contract between union members and the county went into mediation, conducted by James Daley, then-chairman of the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission. Each side had issues they wanted incorporated into the collective bargaining agreement that the other objected to, Donohue said.
One of those issues was the 12-hour shift schedule, but it did not trigger the back-and-forth negotiations leading to mediation, he added, and the major issue was wages.
Lack of support?
Part of the union’s criticism of Sternard was an allegation that her response was dismissive of staff concerns about excessive overtime and declining morale. The resolution stated Sternard had responded to concerns raised in meetings by saying that morale was “their problem.”
Sternard said she doesn’t recall ever saying it’s “their problem,” and conversations she has about morale are more complex than a single comment.
“We all get to choose what kind of attitude we want, and if we’re going to get stuck in other people’s drama,” she said during an Oct. 6 interview. “If coming here is bad everyday, then maybe it’s not for you, and that is part of a bigger discussion.”
“I believe morale is a shared responsibility,” she wrote in a follow-up email to Knock. “Each of us has to take responsibility for our own morale and attitude, as well as contribute to the morale of our team.”
Sternard said she checks in with division leaders every week during meetings to ask about morale and concerns. If there are situations affecting morale, Sternard said she addresses them and works with her staff to find solutions.
A last resort
Although the Wisconsin Professional Police Association does not work directly with the Door County Sheriff Deputies’ Association, Palmer said votes of no-confidence come up frequently with unions.
The organization has only actually endorsed a no-confidence effort on two occasions, Palmer said, because such a vote rarely achieves its goal — changing a leader’s conduct — unless it’s part of a broader strategy.
A vote of no-confidence is often a tool of last resort for a union, when other attempts to raise issues have not been successful, he said.
Votes of no-confidence are used to express a collective view that individual officers might not feel comfortable expressing, Palmer added.
“Retaliation is one of the reasons an organization like ours exists,” he said.
Don Taylor is a department chair and professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers and said there is a difference between public and private sector labor unions.
“Police officers work in a very different environment and context than factory workers, nurses or teachers,” he said. “When faced with a group of workers who’s unhappy with a member of management, there are things that factory workers may do that are very different from what police may do. Police aren’t going to walk off the job or have a picket line.”
Local government employees are prohibited from striking by Wisconsin state law.
All regular full-time and part-time employees within the Sheriff’s Office are represented by the union, according to collective bargaining agreements. The sheriff, chief deputy, captains, lieutenants, confidential clerical, executive, managerial and supervisor employees, and general municipal employees do not receive union representation.
That does not mean every member participates regularly in union activities or took part in the vote of no-confidence. Sheriff candidate Curt Vandertie has said he has not been active in the association for several years.
Additionally there are no hard and fast rules governing how a union may take such a vote, according to Taylor and Palmer.
Knock reached out to the Deputies Association for information about how many members participated in the vote. The association’s legal counsel, Tom Sucevic, replied that the association is “not going to be speaking on the no confidence vote beyond what was published.”
Responding to speculation that vote timing was intended to influence the sheriff race, Taylor said using a vote of no-confidence that way makes sense to him and the focus should still be the union’s concerns.
“To dismiss it as electorally motivated leaves unanswered the question, ‘why?’” he said.
“Maybe they’re just so mad about the workplace relationship that they’re not even thinking about the election,” Taylor said. “But I would be very surprised if it’s not at least a significant factor because that’s what public sector employees do. It’s an incredibly obvious route of address for public sector workers.”
One way to ensure a vote of no-confidence is successful, Palmer said, is to document prior efforts to change leadership conduct or the work environment.
“Its not uncommon for a deputy to express a view to the chief or sheriff in passing, in the hallway,” Palmer said. “We try to remind groups, just like you have to build a record with your police work, you have to memorialize efforts to improve your work environment so you can point to it.”
According to the results of Knock’s open records request to the Sheriff’s Office, there are no formal complaints or documentation of the issues cited by the union in its no-confidence resolution.
Since the resolution was publicized, Sternard said, she and county administration have reached out to union leadership and offered communication and mediation, and the union rejected the overture. Association representatives did not respond to requests for comment on this issue.
“We responded to try to work on things, and now they want to put it to rest,” she said.
Sternard also said her immediate priority and responsibility is to staff the jail.
“I’m going to do what I can right now from within. I’ll do what I can to help,” she said, referring to those efforts. “I remain hopeful for anyone who sits in this chair after November 3rd.”
A version of this story was originally published by Door County Knock, an independent, nonprofit news organization covering Door County, Wisconsin. Subscribe to its newsletters here.
Door County Jail declares staffing emergency as staff shortages drive overtime and low morale is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
