By ALEXANDER SIMONE

Staff writer

With December clothing expenses of $664.07, including $18.75 in dry cleaning, it would seem the Marion County Sheriff’s Department are the best dressed in the county.

But when looking at cash expenditures independently, the expenses make sense.

Departments sometimes leave expenses until the end of the year and make several purchases at once, county clerk Tina Spencer said.

“They wait to see how their expenses go through the year and if there’s something they need to purchase and have the budget, sometimes they’ll do that at the end of the year,” she said. “It’s just managing their budget, making sure they have enough to take care of what they need.”

Of the clothing expenses, the two largest were an embroidery charge for $239.15, and a purchase of 100 uniform patches for $170.

These two were higher than usual because uniform patches are bought in bulk for cost savings and several are sewn on the uniforms at a time, Sheriff Rob Craft said.

“When you put them on shirts, you need two and you don’t order them except every few years, so you keep a supply on hand,” he said. “You don’t just do one piece at a time.”

The other major clothing expense was pants. While a pair of new uniform shirts totaled $51.45, each pair of pants was twice as expensive, at $161.97 for three.

“Most of the time in the sheriff’s department when they’re buying clothing, it’s to replace clothing, or it’s for a new officer because we’ve had turnover,” Spencer said. “It’s not a really frequent thing.”

The department has the uniforms dry-cleaned every so often to keep them in better shape, Craft said.

“You have to sometimes freshen them up,” he said. “Sometimes you can launder them, but eventually you have to run them through the dry cleaner’s to get them back where they’re supposed to be.”