Legislative committee hears testimony on bill to reopen Franklin County jail

AUGUSTA – At a public hearing today before a legislative committee, Franklin County officials testified in favor of a bill that proposes the detention center, currently a facility to hold detainees up to 72 hours, be returned to a full-service county jail for prisoners.

The 13-member Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety heard testimony and asked questions during the hearing on LD 238, “An act to designate the jail in Franklin County as a jail rather than a holding facility.” The proposed bill, sponsored by Sen. Thomas Saviello, R-Wilton, now moves to a work session for discussion and a vote by the committee on whether to send it on to the Legislature for its consideration. The work session is set for 2 p.m. Monday, March 4.

The jail was converted to a 72-hour holding facility for detainees after the state took over the corrections system in 2009. Currently, Franklin County’s prisoners are shuttled back and forth, a 50-mile round trip, from the Somerset County jail in East Madison for court appearances and doctor appointments in Farmington.

Saviello told the committee like the school consolidation movement five years ago, the state’s jail consolidation was “forced,” and “a bit of a fiasco,” he said. “It’s broken; it needs to be fixed.”

The result of converting Franklin County’s 30-year-old jail with 29 beds, which in the past held as many as 54 prisoners at a time, into a holding facility has meant lots of overtime hours spent on the road by officers transporting inmates.

Also lost in the downgraded jail process was the county’s pre-release program, which got prisoners out into the communities to work off their time, providing free labor to municipalities. Other local services, such as the jail’s GED program and vegetable garden, have been discontinued as well; the county can’t keep inmates long enough to run meaningful programming.

“They have skills that can be used in the local community,” said Doug Blauvelt, the jail’s administrator. Low security risk prisoners agreeing to work would get one day taken off of their sentences for every two days worked. Others were allowed to go to their place of employment and return to jail at night so they could remain employed. Those options no longer exist with all the time being served in Somerset County, Blauvelt said.

It costs $120,000 per year to transport inmates. Blauvelt noted the detention center “is in top notch shape” with no new renovations needed to open as a jail. “Beds sit empty and yet other jails are overcrowded.” Sending prisoners to neighboring Somerset County also negatively impacts police and attorneys, who must travel to interview inmates, the court staff’s scheduling is more complicated and it is a safety risk to officers transporting prisoners. In addition, for many families, it’s a hardship to travel for visitation, Blauvelt argued.

The annual budget for the detention facility is set at $1.6 million- all funds that the county’s taxpayers must raise. Nearly $1 million of that is used to fund operations at the facility. The other $600,000 is sent to the state for operations of other correctional facilities.

Currently, an average of 5.25 inmates stay at the holding facility per day, 35 inmates a month or a total of 933 a year.

Blauvelt and County Clerk Julie Magoon compiled the budgetary information for the proposal submitted to the state’s Board of Corrections, which states that the county could operate the jail and its previous capacity for less than $1.6 million. The bulk of the savings, Franklin County Sheriff Scott Nichols, Sr. said, would be moving from a full-time staff of four, which the jail operated with back in 2009, to a staff of three.

“Constituents don’t understand why their money is funding other counties. The system is inefficient and doesn’t work,” Nichols said.

Committee Senate Chair Stan Gerzofsky, D-Cumberland, suggested the matter should be taken up by the BOC, which has the authority to determine correctional facility and county jail use.

“Have you gone to the board to discuss it?” he asked.

Nichols responded by saying he’d been to many BOC meetings and was frustrated with the lack of results. Last fall, the BOC requested data about the jail’s operation three years prior to becoming a holding facility and the three years hence. The information was submitted last month for the board’s consideration.

“This sounds to me a Board of Corrections decision to make or unmake,” Gerzofsky said, who noted he served on the state’s jail consolidation board. “There’s $10 million in savings to the state’s taxpayers,” since the jail consolidation went into effect, he said, “it’s working.”

While some committee members were sympathetic to the county missing out on the inmates’ community service benefits, others questioned the ability to keep the budget under the $1.6 million cap if the facility were once again a full-time jail.

Proposing this bill “is a good way of pushing that board (of corrections) to look at you, to move and act,” Gerzofsky said.

House Chair Mark N. Dion, D-Portland, a former Cumberland County sheriff, suggested that submitting the information to the BOC in January and expecting a response a month later may be unreasonable. Blauvelt said things boiled over last year when Somerset County refused to take Franklin County’s prisoners until they got reimbursed what was owed by the state. Franklin County then had to transport its detainees to the jail in Wiscasset, a round trip that took several hours.

“The whole team went down the tubes when one member refused to take prisoners,” Nichols said of the Somerset County decision.

Blauvelt said he sent several email messages to the BOC to try and fix the Somerset County shutdown problem. Finally the state paid and Franklin’s prisoners were re-admitted to Somerset’s jail. Dion suggested compiling those emailed pleas for help that Blauvelt said went unanswered for the record.

But Dion noted that the overtime paid for transporting prisoners, instead of going for salaries should the full-time jail reopen could mean, “the board of corrections may look at the financials and say nothing needs to be changed.”

“It makes no sense,” said Franklin County Commissioner Fred Hardy of New Sharon. “The jail is within 2 miles of the courthouse. Now, they go 50 miles to court.”

“What would happen if you kept prisoners longer” than the 72 hours, asked Rep. Jethro D. Pease, R-Morrill, a committee member.

“Can’t say that hasn’t been considered,” Hardy quipped.

“Jail consolidation flies in the face of local control,” Pease said.

It “turned control over to the Board of Corrections, another bureaucracy,” Hardy answered, adding he was frustrated the BOC was now in the midst of changing its membership due to term limits.

Gerzofsky asked that a member of the BOC attend the work session next week.

“All I’m looking for is for someone to care about Franklin County. I ask you folks to do the right thing,” Nichols said to the committee members in urging them allow the bill to move on to the Legislature.