Snohomish County Sheriff Rick Bart on Tuesday backed away from a threat to stop working with Tulalip tribal officers.

But Bart’s still steaming over a tribal leader’s role in what he claims was an eruption of “dirty politics” surrounding his department’s budget.

The charge has left some scratching their heads, particularly County Executive Aaron Reardon, whose proposed 2005 budget contains a 2 percent budget cut for the sheriff’s office.

Reardon said Bart seems intent on trying to convince people that sheriff’s deputies are about to be laid off, though that’s not true.

“We’ll find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq before we lay off one sheriff’s deputy,” Reardon said. “Rick Bart needs to start telling the truth.”

Bart and Reardon have been at odds for weeks over the proposed budget.

The conflict spread last week to the Tulalip Indian Reservation, where Reardon on Oct. 20 convened a town meeting to explain his plans for plugging a $13 million deficit by reducing spending and eliminating 80 county jobs – none of them sheriff’s deputies.

Bart maintains that the cuts Reardon has proposed for his department’s overtime and other spending would require him to reduce the number of deputies, regardless of Reardon’s promises.

Last week’s trouble came after several dozen deputies and their wives showed up to picket about not having a contract for the last 19 months. Reardon’s meeting was held at a conference facility inside the tribes’ Quil Ceda Village shopping center.

A tribal law on public assemblies requires groups of more than 25 people to get a permit.

Bart was livid after learning that tribal Police Chief Jay Goss told picketing deputies to move away from the meeting onto public property along a nearby street. The sheriff threatened to revoke the commission that gives Goss and others in his department authority to make arrests on behalf of the sheriff’s office.

Bart on Tuesday met with tribal leaders to discuss the dispute. He later acknowledged that Goss was simply trying to enforce the reservation’s laws, and that revoking his commission would be wrong.

“I’ve gone too far with the tribe on cross-commissioning to pull his commission over some political reason,” Bart said. “Jay did what he had to do. … Tribal police officers had an ordinance and went to enforce that.”

Deputies had picketed previous Reardon budget meetings in Edmonds and Mill Creek. They did not know about the tribes’ permit requirement, said Ty Trenary, president of the Deputy Sheriff’s Association.

“We made a poor assumption and we should have double-checked,” he said.

Goss said he would have warned deputies had he known they were coming.

“I had no idea and was caught totally off guard,” he said.

Bart said the confrontation could have been avoided with a phone call from Goss or Rep. John McCoy, D-Tulalip. Instead, McCoy called tribal police.

Bart responded by pulling his endorsement of McCoy’s re-election bid.

“I don’t care (that there’s an ordinance),” Bart said. “The issue is that they knew they were coming because they were waiting” with nine tribal patrol cars.

That’s not true, Goss said. Three Tulalip officers and one supervisor were on duty that night, and no additional officers were summoned.

Bart said he reacted appropriately last week and insisted the confrontation was triggered by “dirty politics.”

McCoy denied sending tribal police to “lay in wait” for the deputies, or of acting on behalf of Reardon or any county staff.

As for Bart pulling his endorsement, McCoy said “all campaigns have bumps in the road. We’ll move on.”

Law and justice costs have ballooned over the years to where they now eat up more than 70 percent of the county’s general fund. That fund, which pays for the county’s day-to-day operations, would be $173.7 million next year under Reardon’s budget.

The budget still puts the sheriff’s office at the front of the line. Right now, it gets 21 cents out of every dollar spent on the county’s day-to-day operations. The jail gets the next largest cut, at 19 cents of every dollar.