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After news came in that Jaycee Dugard, stolen from a Lake Tahoe street when she was 11 years old, had been found alive and safe at age 29, we also learned that sheriff's officers in Contra Costa County, Calif., had missed a chance three years ago to rescue Dugard.

Someone had reported her alleged captor to the sheriff's office for having people living in tents in his backyard.

A deputy went to the home and gave a warning. He did not go into the backyard, which he probably had no legal authority to do. Nor did he or any other officers follow up to see that changes were made in the backyard. That prompted a round of comments, many of them posted online, critical of the sheriff's office.

I wondered what the people in Contra Costa County were saying, since they are most familiar with their sheriff and his deputies, so I went onto a news site and read some residents' comments. Many of them wondered if the sheriff had enough deputies to do follow-up calls, given the financial problems the county has had (the county this year has been dealing with an $18 million deficit).

"The problem is not too few deputies but too highly paid deputies," wrote one person. "Simply reduce their salaries, benefits and pensions to what police officers are paid in the other 49 states and the problem is solved."

This "less pay, more officers" approach did not seem to impress some residents.

"Contra Costa SO (sheriff's office) is one of the lowest paid departments around already -- do you want the deputies to qualify for food stamps?" was one post.

"There are a lot of people in police work that could have taken much higher paying positions in the private sector but they didn't because they like serving the community as police officers," was another.

But another person wrote, "To all you cops that think you earn your pay BITE ME!!!!!" replied another. "You know darn well that you are living the easy life on the backs of the real men and women that really do work."

These messages were mostly posted on the same day that California's governor ended budget-cutting furloughs at California Highway Patrol 911 call centers because response times were getting longer.

Last Sunday, the Reno Gazette Journal ran a story about the difficulty Nevada has collecting unpaid child support. The state agency that handles the task operates with an out of date computer.

A few days earlier, an opinion survey commissioned by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, found Nevadans wanted services cut rather than taxes raised.

"The statewide poll of 400 registered voters found 51 percent would favor spending cuts compared with 35 percent who would back tax increases," the newspaper reported. "Eleven percent said there should be a combination of tax increases and spending cuts."

Back up north in the Reno Gazette-Journal, resident Steve Davis's letter to the editor faulted budget cutting -- specifically, reducing the money Nevada spends on cloud seeding: "If my math is correct, based on the figures in your article, Northern Nevada gets more than 21 billion gallons of clean, fresh water from extra snowmelt generated by the cloud seeding for only $550,000. This works out to less than three one-thousandths of a penny per gallon ... Less water means less development and less tax revenue, so they are being penny wise and pound foolish."

Late last week Gov. Jim Gibbons said he was creating a "crime commission" to deal with "mortgage fraud, Internet crime, gang problems, Medicare/Medicaid fraud, prescription drug abuse, immigration issues and more." According to Las Vegas City Life, since the shutdown for budget reasons of the state consumer affairs office, "reports of every type of scam imaginable are up ..." Gibbons recommended that the consumer office be closed.

All of these tales have something in common. They also have a lesson: We get the government (or lack of it) for which we pay (or don't pay).