Commissioners considering next steps for pretrial office

El Paso County commissioners approved the creation of a pretrial office a couple of weeks ago. But now, they need to take steps to actually make it happen before it’s supposed to start operations in October.

“Through our county administrators office, we’re currently working on a job description for a pretrial services director,” said Commissioner Vince Perez. “And we hope within a few weeks to a couple of months, we’ll begin the process of hiring that individual.”
The pretrial services director will be tasked with both building up and then running the pretrial services department. The overall office will be in charge of keeping better track of inmate data and saving money in the long run by reducing the inmate population, by ideally getting low-risk offenders out on bond more quickly.

But there are also a lot of policies needing to be put into place to shift some of those related duties from existing offices like adult probation.
“We’ll probably be having to make a sacrifice this year,” said County Judge Veronica Escobar. “Maybe next year, in order to ensure that over the long term, the county taxpayer gets a return on their investment.

The office isn’t without controversy. The professional bondsmen of El Paso opposed the vote to move forward two weeks ago, citing a lack of data on how it will actually work.

Perez said those concerns have been taken into consideration, but we’ll have to see in the next commissioners vote if that was enough.