Request By:
Mr. J. D. "Jimmy" Jones
Caldwell County Sheriff
Princeton, Kentucky 42445
Opinion
Opinion By: Robert F. Stephens, Attorney General; By: Charles W. Runyan, Assistant Deputy Attorney General
You ask whether the sheriff's excess fees may be paid over to a school board. The answer is "no".
A county fee officer, which includes the sheriff, is required to pay over to the county, each year (within a reasonable time after the end of each calendar year of the sheriff's term), the excess of receipts over and above the amounts allowable for his personal compensation, the compensation of his legally authorized deputies and assistants, and authorized official expenses.
Funk v. Milliken, Ky., 317 S.W.2d 499 (1958) 506.
Thus there is no legal authority for a sheriff to turn over any of his excess fees to a school board. The excess must go into the county treasury.
Now what a fiscal court budgets for educational purposes is entirely a different matter. See KRS 67.083(3)(q).