The Yavapai County Board of Supervisors accepted $5,258,566 in funding, donations and spending during its Nov. 5 meeting for the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office, with most stemming from the state of Arizona’s General Appropriations Act, Senate Bill 1735.
Signed into law by Gov. Katie Hobbs [D] on June 27, she heavily touted the bill as spending over $107 million for “Keeping Arizona Safe and Securing the Border,” a June press release from her office reads. Overall, the total spending authorized in SB 1735 is $17.56 billion.
The largest accepted appropriation by the county board was $2 million to operate a Criminal Information Intelligence Analysis Coordination Center, which will be featured in a future story.
Public Safety Building
The county accepted $1 million in appropriations from the state for the construction of a public safety facility in Peeples Valley to reduce response times.
Supervisor Brooks Compton [R-District 1] “has been working on with us for over a year now, even before he was seated … this is part of the Rural Services Master Plan,” Yavapai County David Rhodes [R] said. “We are looking to collaborate centralized services in the rural parts of the county.”
YCSO’s Eastern Area Command that includes of Sedona, Cottonwood and Camp Verde has the lowest average response time of 14.4 minutes. The Southeastern Area Command, that includes Beaver Creek and Rimrock, averages 15.2 minutes, followed by the Northern Area Command at 18.2 minutes and the Southwestern Area Command, that includes Peeples Valley, with the slowest response time of 21 minutes, according to the Yavapai County Rural Services Master Plan report.
Peeples Valley Fire District had 10 acres of land donated by Maughan Ranches in 2024 for the project and will be staffed at the future facility alongside YCSO and an ambulance company.
“There will be two helipads, one for the sheriff and one for a medical helicopter,” Compton later said.
“This was part of Arizona Rep. Selena Bliss’ [R-District 1] pot of money that she was essentially given within days of the state budget closing … this year,” Rhodes said. “We worked together with Bliss and Rep. Quang Nguyen [R-District 1] to figure out how these different appropriations were going to be dished in Yavapai County.”
At the meeting, Nguyen noted that he has a list of $35 million in funding priorities for projects in Yavapai County he plans to introduce in 2026.
“We’re looking at a pretty sad situation coming up in 2026, possibly a billion dollars, upside down,” Nguyen said about the state budget. His priorities included road projects; $10 million for the Northern Arizona Regional Training Academy for law enforcement; $5 million for a health sciences project at Yavapai College; $500,000 for the Prescott Valley Police Department’s investigative software and digital forensics unit; and $250,000 for the Williams Police Department.
In a July 18 letter, Hobbs’ budget director Ben Henderson instructed state agencies to cap their FY 2027 budget requests to no more than a 2% increase, citing uncertainty around the “Big Beautiful Bill” and the end of COVID-19 funding. FY 2027 “is not the year to ask for significant investments from the [state’s] General Fund,” Henderson wrote.
School Safety
The county accepted a $600,000 state appropriation to expand Mutualink School Safety Emergency Alert System into more schools in Yavapai County.
“Mutualink puts a panic alarm on cell phones of school administrators and teachers. You push that button and immediately in … [at] your 911 center, it will come up that they are getting a panic alert from a school,” Rhodes said.
The board originally appropriated $150,000 in June 2022 to fund a pilot program of the software with the Cottonwood-Oak Creek School District to pilot it, “with hopes to integrate all Yavapai County law enforcement agencies and school districts into the system with future funding from the Arizona legislature,” a June 2022 YCSO press release reads.
The software is designed to allow direct communications protocols between school security systems, cameras and first-responders to cut down on call volume and allow dispatchers to get a live video feed of incidents from school staff’s cell phones.
“I think societal issues, more than it is systemic,” Yavapai County Superintendent Steve King [R] said to the JOURNAL. “In today’s world, every time there’s one of ‘those’ events at a school; I can’t even bring myself to say it. You’re always looking for things that might decrease that response time even a little bit more. And I think schools are always looking to increase their efficiency, into their responsiveness.”
Helicopter
A YCSO Hughes 600 helicopter will be updated with $950,000 worth of new equipment consisting of a spotlight, thermal sensing and night-vision capabilities along with a Bambi Bucket to drop water on fires and “we’re going to make this of use to all of the public safety agencies in the county,” Rhodes said.
Starlink
The board accepted $500,000 for a YCSO satellite communications pilot program to install Starlink on YCSO patrol vehicles to allow deputies in the field communicate with dispatchers using Voice Over Internet Protocol.
Consent Items
As consent items, the board accepted spending $100,000 for ammunition for YCSO through the Pinal County Cooperative Agreement with San Diego Police Equipment Co., and $20,603 for the purchase of rifle-rated shields for SWAT.
“Currently, only one [shield] is available [and] increased suspect encounters in SWAT callouts possess rifles,” the agenda reads.
The board accepted $85,963 from the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s Fentanyl Prosecution, Diversion and Testing Grant to fund wages for half the salary of one drug overdose death investigator and three portable drug testing spectrometers through the end of June to address fentanyl-related crimes, prevention and use in the county
