Alamance County’s commissioners have unanimously agreed to let the sheriff temporarily resurrect signing bonuses that he originally debuted a year ago to replenish the ranks of his jailers and patrol deputies.
The commissioners had previously allowed sheriff Terry Johnson to extend 30 of these $10,000 enticements in order to fill the 77 frontline vacancies that his agency had when the payments were initially authorized in the summer of 2024. The commissioners stipulated that the first $5,000 of each bonus would be paid out upfront, and the remainder doled over a 22-month period – with the employee obligated to pay back the net should he or she leave the sheriff’s employ before then.
The sheriff continued to offer these bonuses through the opening months of 2025 – at which point he had all but depleted the “lapsed salaries” that had bankrolled the five-figure payouts. By then, the vacancy rate had dropped to just over 40 positions – which Johnson took as confirmation that the bonuses had worked as intended.
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Johnson nevertheless returned to the commissioners on Monday to request eight additional bonuses. This time, the sheriff proposed to cover these payouts with $80,000 from his agency’s drug seizures in lieu of lapsed salaries. His focus, moreover, was trained on the 33 openings in his detention division – where he said an ongoing staffing crunch has created an untenable situation for his remaining jailers.
“We are working our detention officers to death,” he insisted when he appeared before the county’s governing board. “We need more help with the inmates we’re holding now. We have some of them sleeping on the floor…which puts my people in serious danger and other problems arising with possible lawsuits.”
Johnson insisted that the staffing issues in his detention division aren’t necessarily related to a long-standing contract that he has to hold federal immigration detainees on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Although the sheriff has previously conceded that the bureau’s appetite for detention space has been heightened by the enforcement priorities of the current Presidential administration, he told the commissioners that his immediate concern is the condition of local inmates.
In an earlier report to the commissioners, Johnson estimated that the local inmate population had averaged about 346 a day in 2024 – a figure that he found uncomfortably close to the jail’s maximum capacity of 396 inmates. On Monday, the sheriff said that the facility’s bedspace has been further strained by a recent predilection among the county’s judges to sentence low-level offenders to spend the weekend in jail.
“That requires more efforts on our detention officers because you have to book ‘em in and book ‘em out,” he added. “That’s working our officers to death…We have had two who came to work under the bonus program who’ve already quit. Why? Because we’re killing the officers who are back there.”
The commissioners, for their part, weren’t entirely enthusiastic about the sheriff’s request for more signing bonuses.
Commissioner Ed Priola suggested that he and his colleagues should have some additional time to consider Johnson’s proposal. The rest of the board didn’t find such a delay necessary. Even so, commissioner Pam Thompson did share a number of misgivings about the proposed bonuses.
“We have to be really careful,” she chided Johnson. “I know folks who have worked many years for you and when they see someone new getting a bonus, they wonder ‘why am I not getting a bonus?…and you can’t keep coming here asking us for things that we don’t have money for.’”
The sheriff assured the commissioners that he has already lined up some potential recruits who’ve agreed to sign up with agency once the $10,000 enticements are reauthorized. Yet, Steve Carter, the vice chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, cautioned Johnson that he needs to stop dangling these bonuses in front of prospective new hires.
“I think it’s incumbent on you, at this time, to make sure that, in the future, the reference to bonuses isn’t put out there,” he said.
In the end, the commissioners voted 5-to-0 to let Johnson use $80,000 in asset forfeiture funds to cover up to eight more signing bonuses. In addition, they instructed him to supplement these funds with the repayments from former bonus recipients who didn’t stick around long enough to hang on to the sheriff’s compensatory bait.
According to the sheriff’s office, three of the sheriff’s recent recruits have, so far, had to repay their signing bonuses before they quit before the mandated 22-month period elapsed. The county’s finance director observed that the two of these three individuals will have posted their repayments during the current budgetary cycle – making those funds available for Johnson to use.
