The Lincoln County Board of Commissioners gave approval to recommended prisoner transport and program budgets for fiscal years 2014 and 2015, but want the Board of Corrections to know the budgets are not high enough.
Sheriff Todd Brackett said his proposed $446,195 prisoner transport and programs budget for fiscal year 2014, which began July 1, is only up about $1000 up from last year’s. The proposal is as close he could get to the Board of Corrections’ request for flat funding, Brackett said.
In working with the Board of Corrections and Two Bridges Regional Jail to meet the mandate of flat funding, “this is the budget I feel I have to submit,” Brackett said.
The budget contains very few changes, and no increases to the contracts with Addiction Resource Center and the Volunteers of America pre-trial diversion program, Brackett said. Brackett said he asked the two groups to hold the line on their contracts just as the Board of Corrections asked the counties to do.
The budget line for those two contracts, just under $80,000 for last year and the same proposed for fiscal year 2014, was $101,000 two years ago but some of the work done by Volunteers of America has been absorbed by Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office staff, Brackett said.
Brackett said he would prefer to submit a budget of $493,710 to return the Volunteers of America contract to $101,000 to bring a caseworker back to full time.
The van used for transportation of prisoners also recently “died” and the LCSO is currently borrowing a van from Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, Brackett said. The van is estimated to need $2200 in repairs now, but may not pass inspection within the next year due to the condition of its frame, he said.
There is nothing in the budget to provide for getting a replacement vehicle, Brackett said.
Commissioner Chair William Blodgett said the problem is that the county has a cap on how much it can raise in taxes to support county corrections. “That’s all the money that can be spent,” he said.
Presumably, the more people that are diverted into the Volunteers of America program, the lighter the load would be at TBRJ, Blodgett said.
The budget is not perfect, but the county can get by on it for another year, Brackett said. Because of the property tax cap, any increase to the transportation and programs budget would reduce the amount of funding going to TBRJ, particularly since the state does not want to contribute any more than they did last year, he said.
“Some people in Augusta think we’ve got these pots of gold that we guard like a dog,” Brackett said. Hopefully the Board of Corrections could be made to understand the county’s plight, he said.
“You’re 10 percent under what you think is an adequate budget?” asked Commissioner Hamilton Meserve.
“Yeah,” Brackett said.
“That ought to be made clear,” Meserve said. The Board of Corrections should also know about the additional $25,000 needed for a new vehicle, he said.
Brackett proposed a $466,532 budget for fiscal year 2015. The increase came from increases in wages, insurance, and gasoline prices, he said.
As fiscal year 2015 gets closer, there will likely be further opportunities to adjust that budget, Brackett said. Both budgets must be submitted together as a biennial budget, he said.
The commissioners approved Brackett’s recommendations, with an annotation that the budget is 90 percent of what it needs to be.