Illegal drugs can be found at the root of nearly every crime, ranging from a broken window to a homicide.

Here’s how Webster County Sheriff Luke Fleener describes it: “Our crime rate is driven by the influx and availability of illegal narcotics in our community.”

What if something could be done to make life miserable for the drug dealers at the heart of all these problems without costing the local taxpayers any more money?

An innovative plan put together by county leaders and the Fort Dodge Community Foundation aims to do just that.

The plan would pool funding from the Webster County Board of Health, the Community Foundation and a rural violent crimes grant received by the county Sheriff’s Department. The Board of Health will chip in money it has to combat the opioid abuse epidemic. The foundation will contribute $30,000 annually.

The result of combining those funds will be a pool of about $90,000 annually that the Sheriff’s Department will use to hire an additional deputy. Having that additional deputy will enable Fleener to commit someone fulltime to working on the illegal drug problem. That deputy will work with law enforcement officers from multiple agencies to ratchet up the pressure on the dealers.

Obviously, adding just one more deputy will not put a complete end to the drug scourge. But doing so will lead to more investigations, more arrests and more seizures of illegal drugs.

We thank the Board of Health and the Community Foundation for stepping out of their traditional roles to address a problem. Both groups saw the value in doing so, and made a significant commitment to the betterment of Fort Dodge and Webster County.

We also thank Sheriff Fleener for bringing all the parties together to create this novel response to a nagging problem.