CLEVELAND — A Cuyahoga County council member says give the sheriff what he’s been asking for: more deputies.
Councilman Mike Gallagher released a deputy overtime analysis and proposal showing that 40 additional hires could save $1.4 million in overtime annually at the sheriff’s department.
Gallagher and his staff crunched numbers after County Executive Chris Ronayne raised a red flag about overtime in February.
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In his analysis, Gallagher noted three main overtime drivers in the sheriff’s department. One of which was the agreement to hold Cleveland inmates in the county jail, hundreds more people on electronic monitoring and an increase in deputies and corrections officers taking inmates to the emergency room.
In February, Gallagher discussed the overtime struggle with News 5 Investigators.
“The overtime historically has been a problem. Especially with the transports out of the jail to MetroHealth, that accelerates it,” Gallagher said.
Ronayne wanted to know why nearly a dozen deputies and corrections officers banked more than $100,000 in overtime in 2025 and claimed the overtime was being rubber-stamped.
“This is a rubber stamp with no authorized supervisor's signature, and I’ve got page after page of this,” Ronayne said in February.
The practice, Sheriff Harold Pretel said, had stopped, but noted that the OT was appropriate.
"Not everybody is like that in the jail. People do like their time off, you just happen to have a dozen employees who are work horses who want to work,” Ohio Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s Adam Chaloupka said.
Chaloupka is the union representative for corrections officers. He says on average, there are between 650 and 675 corrections officers on staff.
“Probably need 800,” Chaloupka said.
Chaloupka says with that gap, you’ll never avoid overtime. But he believes it would help to have a doctor in the jail at night, weekends and holidays, which Gallagher’s analysis says should be part of the contract with MetroHealth.
“That would be huge, and you wouldn’t have as many EMS runs and people out of the jail sitting, which helps our employees because now they’re not double-podded, now they’re not quad-podded, now they can get lunches, now they can get breaks,” Chaloupka said.
Gallagher’s staffing math shows that hiring 40 deputies would cost just over $50M but would offset roughly $6.7M in overtime, saving $1.4 million annually.
In February, Pretel defended his overtime numbers and filed a lawsuit against Ronayne.
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"Additional deputies would reduce the amount of overtime, just like additional officers would,” Pretel said.
We asked Pretel if he planned to ask for more deputies.
“Always ask for more. You go back to the council hearings, going back to when I first started here,” Pretel said.
News 5 reached out to the County Executive and Pretel for comment on Gallagher’s analysis.
The lawsuit between the two is still pending.
