Think about the last time you saw a Wasatch County deputy. Maybe it was at your kid’s school. Maybe it was on Highway 40 after an accident. Maybe it was at a community event in Heber City.
That deputy knows this valley. They know the roads, the neighborhoods, the people. That familiarity isn’t a small thing. It’s the difference between effective law enforcement and a stranger in a uniform trying to figure out where they are.
Right now that’s at risk. And most people in our community don’t know it.
What’s Actually Happening
Law enforcement agencies across Utah are actively recruiting our deputies. Better pay. Housing incentives. Take home vehicles. Career development opportunities. Other counties and cities are making competitive offers to experienced officers — and some of our best people are taking them.
In the last several years Wasatch County has lost nearly 25% of its patrol deputies to outside agencies. That’s not a statistic from somewhere else. That’s happening here, in our valley, right now.
Every time a seasoned deputy leaves, they take years of experience with them. They take the relationships they built with families in Midway and neighborhoods in Heber City. They take the instincts that only come from years of working a specific place. And we start over.
What That Means for Your Family
When you call 911 at two in the morning, response time matters. But so does what happens when the deputy arrives. A deputy who has been here for ten years handles that call differently than someone six months out of the academy who is still learning which roads go where.
Experience isn’t just a resume line. It shows up in real situations, in real moments, in ways that directly affect how safe our community actually is.
When we lose experienced deputies faster than we can replace them, the quality of public safety in Wasatch County goes down. Not immediately. Not all at once. But gradually, in ways that are hard to see until something goes wrong.
The Cost Nobody Talks About
It costs approximately $100,000 to train a new deputy in their first year. That’s before they’ve learned a single back road off U.S. 40, before they’ve built a relationship in the community, before they’ve developed the instincts that only come from time on the job.
When a seasoned deputy leaves for an agency that pays more, that entire investment walks out the door with them. And we pay it again from the beginning.
That’s not just expensive. It’s a cycle that makes us less safe every time it repeats.
What Sheriff Rigby Is Doing About It
The foundation starts with wages. Deputies need to be paid competitively — and that means keeping up with a valley that gets more expensive every time a new development goes in.
Beyond wages, Sheriff Rigby is working to establish a local housing stipend — a direct incentive for deputies to live inside Wasatch County rather than commuting in from somewhere else. Because a deputy who lives here, whose kids go to Wasatch High, who runs into the people they serve at the grocery store on a Saturday — that deputy is invested in this community in a way that a commuter simply isn’t. They’re not just doing a job. They’re protecting the place they call home.
And beyond compensation, the plan invests in career development — tuition reimbursement, pay increases tied to education, and leadership training that gives deputies a real reason to build their future here rather than somewhere else.
What We’re Protecting
When you call for help in Wasatch County, you deserve a deputy who knows this place. Who has been here long enough to understand the community, built the relationships that make their job more effective, and is invested in the outcome because this is their home too.
That’s what this plan protects. Not just jobs — the quality and consistency of the public safety that every family in this valley depends on every single day.
Sheriff Jared Rigby is running for re-election as Wasatch County Sheriff. See his full plan at sheriffjaredrigby.org.
