An email sent to Lincoln County’s legislative delegation on Friday by County Administrator John O’Connell was direct and to-the-point concerning the county jail crisis.

“Reality starts with recognizing the true costs of housing an inmate,” O’Connell writes in the email.

Two bills, LD 186 and 195, which, if passed, will affect the responsibility and future budgets for county jails, were scheduled for a work session on Tuesday, April 21 in the legislature’s criminal justice and public safety committee.

LD 195 permits county jails to use any savings they obtain to be applied to debt service without reducing the payments they might receive from the State Board of Corrections. The bill was sent to the Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee of the legislature on Jan. 29 and has not yet reached a vote by the committee.

LD 186 is also under review by the same committee and would abolish the board of corrections and return responsibility for the jails to the counties.

Commenting that the board of corrections was “unlikely to survive” and that the issue “revolves around funding,” O’Connell urged the delegation to consider actual costs for the jails. He said that while the average cost of housing an inmate at Two Bridges Regional Jail is $109 per day (excluding capital improvements and debt service), the amounts actually paid to the facility vary widely.

Inmates from Lincoln and Sagadahoc counties are charged $151 per day, the U.S. Marshal Service is charged $104 per day per inmate, the Maine Department of Corrections paid $27 per inmate and funding provided by the board of corrections has been $72 per inmate per day. This multi-tiered payment system occurs in other county jails in Maine.

O’Connell pointed out that, while emergency funding will cover jail costs until June 30, realistic transitional or “soft landing” money needs to be allocated to help counties meet costs as the jails are transitioned back to county management. This period could take as long as three years.

At Tuesday’s legislative work session, O’Connell’s concerns were echoed by members of the committee who repeatedly commented that they would not be in favor of any solution that created the need for towns and counties to lift the cap on taxes in order to fund the jails. Further discussion on the bills was tabled by the committee until the next scheduled work session this Thursday.

William B. Blodgett, chairman of the board of commissioners, expressed his disappointment that further discussion about the bills had been tabled until Thursday’s work session.

“They have no plan, nothing,” he said in a phone interview. “The counties have to have something in place by July 1. It will have to be an emergency situation.”