County Jail May Raise City Fees As Costs Surge
Kittitas County WA officials are considering increasing what they charge local cities to put prisoners into county jail as the result of significantly rising incarceration costs. County Sheriff Gene Dana said the Sheriff’s Office also is looking for ways to help the cities reduce the number of people they must put in jail with a possible expansion of the electronic home monitoring program. Reported by the Daily Record.
Dana said the major increasing cost is the shipping of more and more prisoners to jails in other counties and cities as the local inmate population rises. In August 2009 alone, it cost the county around $80,000 to transport and keep prisoners in Chelan, Okanogan and Ferry counties and in the city of Sunnyside jail. “If you do the math we’re pushing up to about $1 million a year just to ship out prisoners,” Dana said. Dana on Friday said an updated projection puts year-end costs to send prisoners elsewhere in 2009 at around $800,000.
That money is coming from “banked” funds generated by a one-tenth of 1 percent local sales tax designated to be put away for improving the county’s criminal detention facilities. The tax was approved in the mid 1990s and is also used to send juvenile offenders to a facility in Yakima County. “We have been counting on those funds to help support improving and expanding our local jail,” Dana said. “That’s money we could be spending locally on a better jail.” At the rate the county is spending to ship inmates out, Dana believes the cost could reach a point where it is exceeding the revenue coming in from the sales tax.
Dana said the county bills the cities of Ellensburg, Kittitas, Cle Elum, Roslyn and South Cle Elum quarterly for jail services. The bill is based on the number of inmates the cities brought in the year before, plus about a 2 percent increase. The cost to house a prisoner in the county jail, Dana said, averages about $50 a day. He said the county’s daily inmate population runs from 120 to 130 if all prisoners are counted at the out-of-county facilities. The overcrowded and aging county jail has been modified to safely hold around 85 inmates, Dana said. “Our costs have risen and most of the entities are now bringing us more prisoners than were expected,” Dana said. “We’re seeing a real increase, especially from the state patrol.”
The challenge, Dana said, is that the Washington State Patrol and other state agencies by law don’t have to pay to put prisoners in the county jail, including Central Washington University police and the state Fish and Wildlife Department. State government officials contend the state supplies benefits that offset that cost, including free use of the state crime lab and toxicology lab, to name a few. Yet right now, the state patrol’s prisoners make up more than 50 percent of the inmate population. The long-term hope is that the state Legislature will act to change the law to give county jails more funding.
Dana said some of the immediate options are to increase the quarterly bills to each of the cities, or begin charging a higher fee based on the actual number of prisoners and for each day they stay in the jail. The sheriff said his office and the corrections staff want to work with county judges to consider how to expand the number of prisoners who go home for “incarceration” with electronic monitoring, thus reducing the inmate population. A challenge, Dana said, is that more than 50 percent of the inmates have residences located outside the county. “That makes it pretty hard to monitor them electronically,” Dana said. “We’re looking at ways to, somehow, keep tabs on them in other counties.” County commissioners, Sheriff’s Office officials and representatives of local cities are set to meet Nov. 4 to discuss the situation. “We want to work with the cities and brainstorm how we can reduce all our costs,” Dana said.
County-City Issues, County-State Issues, Economic Issues, Electronic Monitoring, Overcrowding, WA Kittitas County
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