ALFRED, Maine — Not long ago, a defendant was sentenced to four one-year consecutive sentences. Had the person been sentenced to one four-year sentence, he would have been sent to state prison, according to York County Manager Greg Zinser. But because there were four individual sentences, he is serving his time at York County Jail.
Judicial decisions, years of flat-funded budgets under a consolidated jail system with the state, pretrial inmates spending longer periods in jail awaiting trial and a host of similar issues have contributed to a jail deficit that is hovering around $550,000, jail officials say.
That projection is down a bit from the original $716,000 estimate, partly because of some unspecified efficiencies and a tax increase valued at about $150,000. County officials also have earmarked $233,000 in as yet unidentified personnel savings to further reduce the red ink.
The deficit built up over a period of years, according to jail administrator Michael Vitiello. On Friday, a jail working group convened to bring awareness of the problem and to try and find ways to solve it — for now and over the long term.
The committee is made up of a couple of county commissioners, several members of the county budget committee, municipal officials and other county personnel.
A statewide consolidation effort that took place in 2008 saw big changes in the operation of Maine’s county jails. A state Board of Corrections was put in place, and there were restrictions on how jails could operate.
If they saved money within the system, they couldn’t keep it, recalled York County Commissioner Richard Dutremble. Instead, the savings would be sent to the BOC for distribution to jails that weren’t doing well.
And boarding rates — the amount of money jails were allowed to charge to rent beds to the state or other county jails, and had been a revenue creator for York and other counties — were set at around $22 per bed per day.
That’s far less than what the counties had been charging before the consolidation. At one point in the early 2000s, York County was charging about $65 per day.
In 2004, the jail earned $1 million in revenue from boarding inmates from other jails. In 2006, the county earned $2 million.
But even though boarding is now possible, Zinser told the committee Friday that York County is the farthest away from the counties that need bed space.
“There’s some demand, not much, and one jail is outbidding the other,” Zinser said.
A year ago, the Maine Legislature reversed the 2008 consolidation, but there were strings attached, Zinser said. Revenues that the counties had received for years under the Community Corrections Act were combined with other state funding.
And instead of devoting 80 percent of the state revenue to jail operations and 20 percent to diversion programs, the mandated split is now 70 percent operations and 30 percent diversion.
The Legislature this past session approved supplemental funding for county jails. But while the original bill was for two years, the Legislature approved just one year’s funding.
York County Commissioner Michael Cote said the Maine County Commissioners Association’s Legislative Policy Committee is looking at how counties can work together on potential legislation.
One area they’re mulling is legislation to reform sentencing guidelines, which would in turn help bring down the jails’ daily population. That would not ease the length of time pre-trial detainees wait for trial, but a new unified court building that is slated to be built by 2002 could.
Currently, it takes 253 days for a case to make its way through York County Superior Court, while in Cumberland County, which has the same number of cases annually, it takes less that half that number — 107 days.
A murder suspect can wait years for trial. For example, a Biddeford landlord was housed at York County Jail for three years before pleading guilty to two murder counts about two weeks before his trial was set to begin.
The location of the new court could pose other financial issues for York County. If the court is located on land the county has offered to the state for free and on the jail property, it has projected savings in costs of transporting prisoners to court. But if the court is built elsewhere, Vitiello told the group, he is looking at $250,000-$400,000 in extra expense to staff the new court.
That’s because the new building would have a holding area for inmates waiting to make their court appearance, which would require jail staffing, and would also require officers to escort prisoners to one of about a dozen courtrooms in the new building.
A court location commission hopes to make a decision on where the new court will be located by Nov. 1.
North Berwick Town Manager Dwayne Morin, a member of the working group, asked how Maine’s other county jails were doing.
“I don’t think too many are running in the black right now — most are in the red,” Cote said. “Everyone is about in the same boat.”