Kitsap Sheriff Steve Boyer, one of the county’s premier raconteurs, is known to enjoy telling — and occasionally embellishing — a good story.

But even Boyer would have a hard time exaggerating the impact of his office losing up to 30 positions.

Simply put, eliminating 16 deputies, nine jail guards and three adminsitrative positions — as the county has urged his department to do — would have a noticeably negative impact on the health and safety of Kitsap residents, the paramount function a county government is expected to perform.

Clearly, this crosses the threshold from cutting costs and running more things efficiently to compromising safety.

So what else is there to do?

First, you can forget about a tax increase because it would have to be approved by the voters, who are in no mood to hand over more of their dwindling paychecks to government at any level.

It also wouldn’t be prudent to expect the general economic picture to turn around anytime soon because these things take a while to run their course and indications are we might not even have bottomed out yet.

No one has any easy answers, but the logical place to start is the biggest expense in any organization, and that’s personnel costs.

For many years, during good times, the county government has been extremely generous with its wages, benefits and pension packages. Now those bills are coming due and there’s simply nothing in the bank to cover them with.

As painful as it would be, the county needs a top-to-bottom re-examination of who’s getting how much and why.

Sheriff’s Office staff shouldn’t be excluded from that process, either — which won’t sit well with the affected employees or the unions that represent them.

But the question is whether it makes more sense to employ fewer people making more money or more making less. And where public safety is concerned, the answer seems clear.