The Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office logs millions of dollars in overtime each year to operate its 2,000-bed Adult Detention Center -- an expense that has tripled during the past five years.

Democratic Sheriff Jim Winder defends those hours as necessary for keeping the county jail secure while staffing levels are down. And the County Council seems to agree.

But that’s a policy decision. The issue, in this context, is how to demonstrate through public records that a rise in overtime hours really has occurred.

Here’s how we did it: We pulled numbers from the county’s end-of-year budget reports that include detailed data on the number of allocated positions within the jail, the number of vacancies (as of December) and the amount of money spent in overtime.

The one-stop shop for those numbers would be the Auditor’s Office, even though we directed our inquiry to the county’s human-resources division and the Mayor’s Office.

What we found is that the jail’s overtime hours ballooned from $1.1 million in 2003 to $3.2 million last year. Meanwhile, the number of jail vacancies rose from 22 positions to 71. Only recently did those numbers diverge: the number of empty jail jobs declined in 2008, but OT hours are expected to remain steady at $3.1 million.

Interesting? We thought so.

The sheriff told the County Council this week that his overtime expenses really are reasonable. As proof, he demonstrated through a slide show that the jail’s salaries have increased about 5 percent annually -- about the same as corrections’ overall expenditures.

By the way, that slide show is a public document, too. We got it.

-- JS