“The jail bills are killing us,” commissioner Basil Huffman said at Thursday’s meeting.
Without a county jail, Forest County’s prisoners are housed at a facility in Warren County. The agreement between the two counties calls for Forest County to pay $55 per day per inmate, plus any additional medical costs.
The panel voted Thursday to pay a $20,985.91 bill for prisoner maintenance throughout July after the previous month’s bill was $20,491.94.
“We routinely would see a $6,000 to $8,000 bill every month and, when it got to be above $10,000, our toes started to curl,” commissioner Norm Wimer said. “This is $20,000. It’s a tough pill for us to swallow.”
Forest County District Attorney Barbara Litten attended Thursday’s meeting and told the commissioners part of the problem is her caseload is twice the size it was at this time last year.
She said last year there were roughly 58 cases for the whole year and there are already 70 this year through the end of August.
“It’s just a general across the board increase in the number of cases that are coming in,” Litten said. “I don’t really see a huge surge in any one type of a crime over another … There isn’t any one factor that I can really see.”
“I’m doing everything I can to keep people out of jail,” Litten told the commissioners. “We’re running them through the system.”
Litten said she tries not to recommend a sentence of incarceration unless it is appropriate for the case being presented, but the non-confinement options can be limited because she said she still has to take the safety of the community into consideration when dealing with someone with an extensive criminal history.
In addition, not all crimes end up moving prisoners to a state facility after sentencing where the county would not have to fit the bill for their stay, Litten said.
Sheriff Bob Wolfgang also said Thursday his department is trying to save the county every penny possible by expediting the transfer of prisoners to state facilities after they are sentenced.
Bob Snyder, the chairman of the commissioners, said the county will be in a tough spot financially by November or December if the prisoner maintenance bills continue at the current pace because they never budgeted for this amount of money.
Snyder indicated the commissioners will look into a myriad of options such as dipping into capital reserves, pulling potential leftover funds from other budgets and borrowing money if it reaches a critical point.
Regardless, the extra dollars flowing to prisoner maintenance will make the first three months of 2017 difficult, Snyder said, because the county’s tax revenue won’t start kicking in until at least March or April.
The budget process is expected to begin this month, and Snyder said the last thing he wants to do is to have to raise taxes.