During a meeting of the Two Bridges Regional Jail Authority, an agreement to enter into an 18-month contract with Waldo County was unexpectedly the subject of a sharp division between those who wanted to pass the agreement for the full 18 months and those who wanted to pass it for only six months or 12 months.

Lincoln County Sheriff Todd Brackett, concerned that conditions would change dramatically for the jail at some point over the 18-month contract, attempted to convince fellow board members that they should agree only to a six-month contract with Waldo County. Waldo’s current contract is up for renewal. Because Waldo is changing over to a calendar year budget from a fiscal year budget, it asked to continue the same terms of its contract for 18 months. Waldo is currently paying $1.2 million per year. It proposed a $600,000 contract for the last half of the 2016 calendar year and $1.2 million for the full calendar year of 2017.

Over the length of the Waldo contract, the county has never filled the full number of beds set aside for its use. Two Bridges has had to staff for them as though they were full, however, and calculated that the cost per inmate worked out to $101 per night for beds that were occupied. Brackett’s concern is the increasing number of people entering the jail who are suffering from addiction or mental illness, and worried that the cost over the 18-month period would at some point outstrip the contracted rate. “I think there is going to be a major upheaval in our costs,” he said.

Jail Administrator Mark Westrum said that Waldo was open to negotiating a multiplier for unexpected cost increases, but Brackett wasn’t content with the compromise.

“At the end of the day, I’m concerned about Lincoln County taxpayers,” Brackett said. “We shouldn’t be in a position of having our taxpayers foot the bill for another county’s jail inmates.”

Brackett requested an executive session to hash out the contract language. After nearly an hour, the board reconvened and voted, 7-3, to approve the Waldo County contract for the full 18-month period.

Brackett said that he had been hoping for a six-month contract, but would have been willing to vote for a 12-month contract. “We didn’t carry the vote,” he said. “But I think we need to do more as we make these agreements to benefit our local taxpayers.”

The Authority also wrangled with a potential agreement between four “receiving” jails to set a per diem rate. Westrum was not comfortable entering into the agreement, which was thought to be moving in the direction of $108 per bed per day. 

The receiving jails are Two Bridges, Cumberland, York and Somerset. The rest of the state’s 15 jails are suffering from various degrees of overcrowding, but because of lack of revenue, cannot send their inmates to other jails for a per diem rate even if Public Law 335, enacted this year, didn’t forbid it.

PL 335, which ended jail consolidation, prohibits the jails from charging one another a per diem rate if the state is paying $12.2 million or more to the county jails, as it did this year. The Legislature also overrode a gubernatorial veto to provide an additional $2.4 million to the jails. However, county officials have said most of those funds will likely go to the badly overcrowded facilities, not the receiving jails that could accept inmates, and the overcrowded facilities can’t, by statute, pay Two Bridges or any other jail to take their overcrowded inmates.

Westrum is concerned that by entering an agreement with the other counties that is too high for the sending counties to afford, his hands would be tied to enter into other agreements, but conversely, if TBRJ and the other jails didn’t unify around a single price, there would be bidding wars as there had been in the past, and the taxpayers of Lincoln and Sagadahoc counties would end up subsidizing taxpayers in other counties who don’t adequately support their own jails.

Sagadahoc County Sheriff Joel Merry moved that Westrum direct the delegation to the receiving jails association to set a “low” rate, based on the jails’ own actual costs. The motion carried.

The Authority board also agreed to “unfreeze” one of the vacant positions at the jail to allow Westrum to hire an additional correctional officer, freeing up one of his current officers to serve in the reception area, a badly needed position. In addition to the newly “unfrozen” position, TBRJ has seven open correctional officer positions. The jail had just graduated a class of seven, but four people resigned in the same week, including one of the new recruits. Working up to full staffing has been a time-consuming task, Westrum acknowledged.

The corrections officers voted down a plan to unionize, and Westrum said he believed that supervisors would follow suit this week.