Lincoln County Administrator John O’Connell plans to attend a state Board of Corrections (BOC) budget workshop in Augusta on Wednesday to seek answers to unanswered questions.
“The counties must get answers to some significant questions before linking their futures to the proposed consolidated corrections system,” he said in a memo Tuesday following the regular commissioners’ meeting when the board discussed the issues with Lincoln County Sheriff Todd Brackett.
Brackett serves on the BOC’s Working Group that deals with the county jail budgets in particular and seeks an increase in the state’s inmate housing fee at Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset from $22 to $26, to match what inmates from Knox County pay now.
The Wednesday workshop is the last one before the Aug. 5 meeting when the BOC said it would be making its final decisions on corrections budgets, including that for Two Bridges.
“Obviously time is of the essence, since some of these decisions and votes may be irreversible and have negative long term effects on our county corrections system,” he said.
O’Connell listed nine questions he considers significant enough to ask at the Augusta meeting.
“It is ominous that we are four weeks into the ‘new’ system with so many unanswered questions,” he said.
One of the questions concerns overall finances: The status of the $3.5 million the state has promised for fiscal year 2010 for county jails seems up in the air still.
“Is this a solid number without strings attached? Or is it going to be reduced by an amount for contingency? Or reduced in absolute terms?” he asked.
O’Connell made the point the transitional $1.5 million for six months ended June 30 and wonders if the state will take back the monies by means of future offset to county correctional reserve accounts.
It remains to be seen if the state will make supplemental funding available in fiscal year 2010 if needed and whether any money will be available for county corrections in fiscal year 2011. Payment schedules, CCA funds and an $80 million state revenue shortfall all provoke more questions.
In county caps for the jails, he asks whether the state will correct them for any county except Somerset and also asks about surpluses and unresolved legal issues, as well as marginal rates.
The BOC leaves questions unanswered about understaffing and under-funded activities, being overworked and unpaid, and counties being under-represented with a significant time commitment required, not determined as a cost to counties.
Other county corrections costs have no accounting of items, such as actual transportation and other costs of reorganization are likely to be higher than budgeted, and the loss of economic benefits of work done by inmates in local communities all remains uncalculated.
O’Connell also poses questions about the state Dept. of Corrections’ (DOC) operations and budget not facing the same scrutiny as counties, with the BOC having no power over the DOC budget.
O’Connell said the DOC commissioner has veto power over assignment of inmates under the new centralized system.
Other criticisms concern the DOC’s skill sets (which is different from the county jails’ skill sets), its control of the agenda through the provision of the legal and financial staff, and an apparent conflict of interest when calculating marginal rates.
An eighth question concerns liability. “All liability of all inmates, state or county, rests on the county system,” O’Connell said. “There is a cost to this which should not be borne solely by the counties and their property taxpayers.”
“The game is not yet over, but the bets are already being settled,” O’Connell said.
At the commissioners’ meeting Monday, Blodgett urged Brackett to protect any funds the county has obtained through savings and not let them go to the state as planned.
Blodgett was referring to the $130,079 the county saved in its Sheriff’s budget this year, which the BOC said at a recent meeting should go to meet expenses at Two Bridges over the cap limit instead of from the state corrections investment fund.
