Jail Costs Crippling MN County
Vice-chairman Don Carlson of the Hubbard County MN Board of Commissioners wonders if the county would be better off shutting the three-year-old jail down. This report from the Park City Enterprise.
He – and his fellow commissioners – are getting increasingly alarmed that the operational costs of the facility are crippling the county; it might be more fiscally responsible to close the doors and ship the 30-some inmates it currently houses to other facilities … “It has been mentioned but nothing has been looked at very deeply,” commissioner Greg Larson admitted. “It would be pretty drastic to mothball the whole thing and use the old facility again” …
The Enterprise scrutinized jail expenses over a three-year period, from its opening in 2006 through 2008. Many of the major expenditures have been put in the accompanying chart. During that period, the costs to operate just the jail portion of the law enforcement center increased more than $500,000. The annual bond payment, an obligation that will run until 2025, is around $640,000 this year. It’s not part of the operational costs.
When the jail budgeted $250,000 in revenues last year, but only collected $58,950, county commissioners reacted in horror. “Why didn’t the other costs go down, too?” Heeren questioned, voicing the sentiments of the board. And that’s where they want the bleeding stopped. “It doesn’t make any difference what the building costs because you will pay that off eventually,” Carlson said. The building will be an asset to the county. “But your costs of operations are what you really have to be concerned with because you will never pay off the cost of operations,” he said. “They go on forever” …
Carlson’s frustration led him to embark on his own investigation into the daily inmate population. “I came up with an average inmate number of somewhere in the low 30s” per month, he said. The facility is designed to hold 116 prisoners. Because a Minnesota Department of Corrections examination found some deficient areas, the facility needs a minimum of 16 jailers, plus dispatchers, “plus a slew of part-time personnel,” Paul said, to operate … In 2006, before the jail opened and Hubbard County had to ship out its inmates, it spent $72,316.76 to house them elsewhere for about half of the year. The costs would fluctuate, depending on the number of inmates the county has. Transportation costs of ferrying prisoners to and from court appearances would also vary, depending on inmate numbers and gasoline prices. But they certainly wouldn’t rise to the $1.8 million in operational costs the facility incurred in 2008.
The complete article in the Park City Enterprise is full of additional detail.