COLDWATER, MI (WTVB) - Yesterday’s Finance Committee meeting of the Branch County Board of Commissioners seems to indicate it’s anybody’s guess just how many Sheriff’s Department Road Patrol deputies will get their layoff notices at the end of the month. The full County Board will have its final session of the year tomorrow and will adopt the county’s 2013 budget.

Retiring Sheriff Warren Cannon and Sheriff-elect John Pollack both addressed Commissioners Tuesday and Cannon gave the committee a new nut to chew on. He said he talked with County Administrator Bud Norman on Monday to reveal that his department basically has a budget surplus for 2012 to carry forward to next year with about two hundred thousand dollars remaining each in the road patrol and corrections department budgets with the total unused funding possibly as high as six hundred thousand dollars.

Finance committee chairman Commissioner Rod Olney briefly reacted saying that’s the first he’s heard of the black ink. The Sheriff’s Department quandary exists following last month’s defeat at the polls of a millage increase to fund the road patrol. Next year’s budget, at least in the most recent draft, was supposed to contain a million dollars in cuts for the Sheriff’s Department.