County commissioners emerged from a long session behind closed doors this week with somewhat reassuring words: York County government will likely be able to avoid making layoffs until the end of the year.
This was good news to the county employees who crowded into the small courtroom for the Board of Commissioners meeting Wednesday. A budget crisis had raised fears that county cuts would be immediate and drastic.
But the crisis has only been deferred until 2010, leaving scores of clerks, deputies and other non-jail employees fearing that their jobs may be good only for the next six months. The effort to find a long-term solution must be expanded.
After all, a loss to 20-40 private sector jobs would be widely viewed as a significant blow to the local economy. The potential loss of this many county jobs should be viewed with equal concern and state officials should do what they can to help the county solve a problem that arises largely from newly enacted legislation.
A new state rule on the spending of jail revenue seemed to leave York County about $932,000 short this year. The rule emerged from the state’s efforts to consolidate county and state correctional facilities. Lawmakers took the arguable position that revenues earned by the Maine counties for boarding state prisoners should be used for jail purposes only.
The York County budget was drafted without taking this restriction into account.
Legislators likely wanted to prevent county officials from tapping what they saw as a Corrections Dept. surplus. But York County could argue that it invested in a big jail with the intention of using excess capacity to board prisoners, and that York County taxpayers are still making payments on the 20-year bond.
And although the state has set a cap limiting the amount counties will pay for confining prisoners, the cap for York County was set unrealistically high.
York County has averted the crisis ”“ for the short term. Although the solution has involved cutting expenses and finding other sources of revenue, a large part of the solution ($250,000) results from a lawyer’s opinion. The opinion reportedly holds that the original jail consolidation law was vague about the matter of jail revenue and that the county is entitled to use jail revenue through Sept. 15, when a clarifying amendment takes effect.
If a mere legal opinion can be worth $250,000, imagine what legislation could do. The next legislature should consider what it can do to help York County and other counties make the transition required by the state without hardship.
— Questions? Comments? Contact Kristen Schulze Muszynski or Nick Cowenhoven at 282-1535 or kristenm@journaltribune.com or nickc@journaltribune.com.
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