2 days Ago By Matthew Voigt
GRAND FORKS – Former Grand Forks County Correctional Center Administrator Bret Burkholder's recent termination was preceded by back-and-forth emails to and from the North Dakota attorney general's grant office about how a "Back the Blue" grant could be spent. The Grand Forks Herald obtained the emails between Burkholder and the grant office, sent between mid-February and March. They began on Feb.
18, when Burkholder asked if the grant’s funds — set aside by the Legislature for recruitment and retention bonuses — could instead be used for employee incentive programs like personalized gift cards, and if so, how best to allocate funds within the framework of the grant. ADVERTISEMENT “We have purchased a number of items under the umbrella of ‘retention' to make (staff members') life a bit better while working here, enhancing much of their breakroom with amenities they never had,” Burkholder wrote in the Feb. 18 email.
“Is this permissible under the grant? We sure hope so as we believe this idea is much better than simply purchasing them appreciation gifts now or providing a cash outlay to them and then have 20% leave within the year.” On March 7, Grants and Contracts Officer Deanna Gierszewski replied to Burkholder saying that wasn’t allowed, adding that the funds needed to be used by March 31 and within the 2023-2025 biennium. “What you are requesting to do with the funds does not match the purpose these funds were intended for,” Gierszewski wrote.
When Grand Forks County Sheriff Andy Schneider learned about the misapplied funds during his department's merger with the jail, he brought the issue to the Grand Forks County Commission on April 1 and explained measures he had taken to mitigate the issue. The roughly $38,000 that had already been spent from the $88,000 grant GFCCC received was to be covered out of other budgeted correctional center funds — such as office supply funds or general operations, depending on the expense — and the full $88,000 has now been given as a bonus to GFCCC employees, Schneider told commissioners at that time. However, the incident led the commission to recommend, in a 3-2 vote, that Schneider fire Burkholder.
Schneider, who has sole authority to discipline and terminate in his department, terminated Burkholder’s employment on April 8, saying that his service was no longer needed as GFCCC moves in a different direction. The "Back the Blue" grant was created by the Legislature in 2023 to aid the recruitment and retention of law enforcement and correctional officers. Funds were disbursed through the Attorney General’s office to 106 law enforcement and correctional agencies across the state.
The Grand Forks jail is the only recipient of the grant to use the funds incorrectly, according to Gierszewski. When grant agreements were signed in November 2023 to authorize the disbursement of the funds, Burkholder wrote in the grant acceptance letter that he intended to use the money for retention bonuses, length-of-service recognition garments, a recruitment bonus and other appreciation activities or materials. ADVERTISEMENT Later, that evolved into more of a focus on improving working conditions for employees at the correctional center, with the idea that those improvements would invest this grant into GFCCC and “make a perpetual impact,” Burkholder wrote in his December 2024 update to the grant office.
The philosophy, according to Burkholder, was this: Had the correctional center given out a flat monetary bonus, because of the department's high turnover, a quarter of the funds would have gone to people no longer employed by GFCCC. On March 18 — after Gierszewski informed him the jail's purchases did not match the grant's intent — Burkholder asked for clarification on how the grant could be used. “I apologize for the urgency of this request, but we are limited in time, and if this was a misunderstanding of uses of what the funds could be used for, I need to ensure that the cost of these things aren’t applied to the grant and rather simply added to a one-time bonus,” Burkholder wrote.
Later that day, the Grand Forks County Commission voted to merge GFCCC into the sheriff’s office and the sheriff became the head of the corrections center. Gierszewski replied on March 20 and said that an agreement had been signed and that an update would be needed to reflect how the grant funds were actually used. “After reviewing your application budget plan, I’d like to kindly remind you of the importance of adhering to the terms outlined in your original agreement,” Gierszewski wrote.
“While we understand that the funds may have been used differently than initially planned, the agreement itself remains unchanged.” ADVERTISEMENT The bill and grant language does not explicitly define a bonus, but the attorney general's grant office said that the intent was for a monetary bonus given directly to employees. “When you go back and listen to the legislation that everyone was pushing for .
.. that is the route that they were intending to go down and that is what everyone in their (grant) statement said they were going to spend it,” Gierszewski told the Herald.
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