A chunk of the money used to pay for a drug enforcement network aimed at catching big fish in the narcotics trade will dry up soon, and law enforcement officials on the North Olympic Peninsula are wondering how to plug the hole for the long term.

Next year, the Olympic Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Team, or OPNET, is bracing to receive $160,000 less from a federal grant than it did this year.

And with an annual budget of about $540,000, that’s not small-time change, Port Angeles Police Chief Tom Riepe said.

Riepe is also chairman of the OPNET Policy Board.

“We can only get so lean,” he said.

Those federal dollars may not entirely disappear from the area, said a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice, but the focus and scarce resources are being reassigned to fight terrorism.

At the same time, dollars that pay for a Washington State Patrol detective who works with OPNET are being cut in half.

The task force that usually pursues drug kingpins and ringleaders throughout Clallam and Jefferson counties will have to find about $40,000 to keep the detective, Riepe said.

Analyst position cut

Even after slashing an information analyst position that helps detectives sift through leads and clues, the task force will come up short.

For the next year, the plan is to fill the approximately $150,000 budget gap through the summer of 2006 with money from drug seizures and forfeitures — less the 10 percent that goes to the state — but that’s not a long-term solution, Riepe said.

“First it’s the ethical issue,” Riepe said.

The money confiscated in drug busts should go toward keeping the task force afloat for the next couple years, he said.

But Riepe doesn’t like the idea of using it as a permanent source because of the pressure that it puts on officers and also because it is an unstable source of funds.

But a new source of dollars will have to be found, because the money from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant that goes to help pay for the 20 drug task forces across the state is going away, said Paul Perz, managing director for the Safe and Drug Free Communities unit of the state Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development.