The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Local News

November 18, 2008

Sheriff’s department to implement drug testing

By Jackie Ayres

Anyone who operates a county vehicle for the Raleigh County Sheriff’s department will be facing random drug tests twice a year and all other department employees stand to be tested once per year.

“The Sheriff’s Department is going to move forward testing their employees immediately,” said Steve Tanner, sheriff-elect for Raleigh County at Tuesday’s Raleigh County Commission meeting.

According to Tanner, drug testing will include a number of preliminary tests for drugs as well as for alcohol.

One of the specifications is that the drug-testing vendor come to the sheriff’s department to test the deputies or employees on site, at random.

“We have a tremendous disadvantage telling someone we need you drug tested, it’s a surprise, drive over here — and then we run into a number of issues where the tests can be tampered with, rather than have the employee come to work and there’s a guy waiting on them to test them,” said Tanner.

Tanner stood before the commission to ask the members to consider making it a countywide policy.

“We have the money within the sheriff’s budget right now, where the sheriff’s department will pay for the testing of the employees, but we’re hoping to get a better deal if we use all the employees operating county vehicles (whether that be maintenance, etc.),” said Tanner.

“There would be a higher number of people being tested, so we’d get a lower discount volume rate on the employees. It would be savings for us if you would consider making this a countywide policy to test,” he said.

“It would seem appropriate that maintenance people ... should be exposed to random drug testing since they operate county equipment and it would seem responsible on our part to do this,” said Tanner.

Commission President Pat Reed said commissioners had recently decided, prior to Tanner’s proposal brought before the commission, to implement countywide drug testing.

“It happened to be at the same time — the commission has determined that we will initiate all county employees to be under random drug testing. We have already asked our attorney to prepare those guidelines,” said Reed.

According to Reed, all employees in all departments will likely be part of the new requirement.

— E-mail: jayres@register-herald.com

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