County Questions WV Regional Jail’s Surplus
Cabell County WV Commissioner Scott Bias said the commission recently requested financial information from the Regional Jail Authority, and calculated that the system had $30 million more than it needed in its accounts for last fiscal year. Report from the West Virginia Sunday Gazette.
“We have serious questions about their budget,” Bias said. “They’re building a huge surplus and charging the counties for it.” Counties pay the jail authority a daily fee of $47.53 per inmate. In July, that will increase to $48.25. Last week, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Walt Helmick, D-Pocahontas, appointed a subcommittee to look at the jail authority’s budget. The authority needs to “have a healthy surplus,” Helmick said. But every cost must be scrutinized, especially in lean times, he added.
Joe Thornton, deputy secretary of the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, said jail officials welcome the legislative review of the budget. But he denied that the jail authority has done anything improper with surpluses. State law allows the authority to keep a minimum of three months of operational expenses, about $19 million, “in case counties like Cabell don’t pay their bills,” he said … The authority understands the fiscal challenges facing counties, and has made sacrifices to keep the per diem as low as possible, he said. “With the costs of everything around us going up, the per diem is still lower than it was two years ago” when it was $48.50, Thornton said.
County-State Issues, Regional Jail System, Regional Jails, West Virginia