The Butler County Sheriff’s office will eliminate nine part-time positions effective Jan. 1, but will create five full-time positions in their stead.

The county salary board on Wednesday voted to make these changes.

Five of the part-time positions paid $17.85 per hour with no benefits or retirement, and four of them paid $19.84 per hour with individual benefits and retirement.

The full-time positions will pay $19.84 per hour with benefits and retirement.

Sheriff Mike Slupe said the changes immediately will save $38,000.

Commissioner Jim Eckstein, who is on the salary board, said that Slupe’s assertion that the move will save money was “drastically misleading the public.” He said that the added benefits that the county would have to pay were not “soft costs” and would not lead to savings.

Eckstein claimed that the sheriff’s office budget has increased 41 percent since Slupe came into office in 2010, which translates to about 8 percent per year.

Slupe said he would not comment on Eckstein’s assertion about budgetary increases.

Controller Ben Holland said that there has been a trend in the past several years for some departments in the county — court-related ones — to increase along the lines of 8 percent per year, which Slupe also noted.

Holland said that with the salary savings and the savings in taxes, the move actually would save almost $50,000 immediately. However, he noted that insurance coverage is an uncertainty. If the benefits that deputies take increase a certain amount, he said the savings could be negated.

Slupe said that of the five part-time deputies who are to be made full-time, four have single health coverage and the other has no county coverage.

In other action, the salary board eliminated an internal auditor for the human services department, a full-time position paying $19.26 per hour, and created an intellectual disabilities specialist, a full-time position paying $22.74 per hour. Joyce Ainsworth, human services director, earlier said the internal auditor retired this year.

Over the years, she said the position moved more from fiscal analysis to data analysis, so she said it makes sense to have a person with an intellectual disabilities background in the job.

The board also eliminated one full-time judicial secretary at $18.29 per hour and created one full-time clerk at $18.48 per hour and one temporary clerk at $18.48 per hour.