The State Board of Corrections does not have enough money in its investment fund to pay the county jails the full amount budgeted for the rest of the year, according to Col. Mark Westrum.
Westrum is the chair of the board as well as the correctional administrator for Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset, which serves Lincoln and Sagadahoc counties.
If third and fourth quarter payments were made to the jails in full, it would cost about $4 million, Westrum told the Lincoln and Sagadahoc Multicounty Jail Authority on March 13. The board’s investment fund only has about $3.3 million in it, he said.
Some options the board, or BOC, has in dealing with the situation is making half payments for both the third and fourth quarters of the fiscal year, making a full third quarter payment and no payment in the fourth, or making no payments at all, Westrum said.
If the third option was chosen, Two Bridges would have to turn away any inmates from outside Lincoln or Sagadahoc counties and staff reductions at the jail would have to take place, Westrum said. “There’s no way around it,” he said.
Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry pointed out that reducing staff and closing a pod at Two Bridges would reduce the total number of beds in the county jail system. Merry agreed to draft a letter to the BOC sharing the authority’s concerns.
The authority also voted to send a letter to the board requesting the immediate release of Two Bridges’ third quarter payment from the investment fund.
Westrum said he was confident that Two Bridges will get through the third quarter, but there may be some pain in the fourth.
Stuart Smith, an Edgecomb Selectman and a member of the board of corrections and its focus group on the budget process, said March 14 the focus group is considering a new formula for disbursing money to the county jails from the investment fund.
The formula would take the net operating income of the county jails into consideration for deciding how payments will be made from the investment fund, Smith said. Net operating income can be positive – more income than expenditures – or negative, he said.
The amount budgeted for the investment fund is the difference between what counties are required to raise for the jails each year and how much it will cost to run the facilities, Smith said.
Even though the investment fund is supposed to have enough money to round out the county jail budgets, things like the recent state curtailments affect whether the fund is fully funded, he said.
The investment fund is not fully funded right now, which is why its balance is about $700,000 less than what the jails are due for the remainder of the year, Smith said.
The potential new formula would be a way for the board of corrections make its funding decisions based on need when it is not able to make full payments to every jail, Smith said.
“We can’t physically give 100 percent of the requests, so we have to dole that money out where it’s most needed, and facilities that are running in the black don’t need it,” he said.
Under the formula, if a county is projected to have a $1.1 million net operating income and is requesting $500,000 from the investment fund, their request may not be fulfilled if the investment fund is not fully funded, Smith said.
“We’re sitting back saying, ‘They don’t need the 500,000 from the investment fund, they’re 1.1 million in the positive,'” Smith said.
The potential new formula may be discussed at the next meeting of the board of corrections, Smith said.
The next meeting of the Maine Board of Corrections is Tuesday, March 19 at 1 p.m., Room 301A of the Marquardt Building, 32 Blossom Ln., Augusta.
