Maine Department of Corrections Deputy Commissioner Jody Breton informed the Boothbay Register/Wiscasset Newspaper Tuesday afternoon that a long-anticipated payment for operations at Two Bridges Regional Jail would be mailed no later than Friday, Sept. 15.

The payment represents the Lincoln and Sagadahoc counties’ portions of the $12.2 million county jail appropriation voted by the legislature and sidelined while the state’s supreme judicial court reached a decision about Gov. Paul LePage’s veto of 65 bills.

“We are finalizing the payments today and are waiting to complete information for one more county,” Breton said. “We would like to get all the payments out next week and our goal is to have the checks reach the counties by September 15th.”

Delays in receiving an August allocation from the state were caused by a number of factors.

“It has been a very difficult transition year for the counties,” Breton added. “Even when the bills were approved by the legislature, we still had to wait to see what the court would say.”

The $12.2 million budget resulted from a number of changes and redirections during the course of the legislative session. LD 186, which called for the dissolution of the previously-established board of corrections, morphed into a new bill and budgeted amounts changed with each committee discussion. It was not until late in the session that the legislature agreed to the changes which are now law.

An amount of $208,000, which would have been received in previous years under the community corrections act, has now been eliminated. The DOC is reviewing each county jail’s average daily population to determine what portion of the $12.2 million it will be receiving. And even that relatively simple calculation has some difficulties.

“Counties calculate average daily population differently,” Bretton said. “At the state level, we base our count on the population at midnight on a given day. But in the counties there is a pre-release population and people who come and go on the same day. And there is nothing in the statute that covers these.”

Going forward, Breton expects that there will be changes introduced in future legislative sessions to address the gaps in the original law. “We also have rule-making authority, so we can try to address some issues that way.”