More contract complications as county investigates jail costs
El Paso County commissioners are continuing efforts to cut down on costs for the county jail system, but are running into more obstacles as well.
The county jail system including the downtown jail is a major money drain for the county, costing more than $70 million a year. Commissioners overall have been directing staff to dig deeper into how much it actually costs to house an inmate per day, so federal inmate contracts can be assessed to see if they’re worth it.
But as staff continue to investigate, they’re finding more that would have to be dealt with before any major changes like shutting down floors at the downtown jail.
Monday commissioners heard about a contract with the city, in place since 2010. It has the city paying the county about $300,000 a year to house municipal inmates – those with warrants coming from things like parking violations or citations, low level local violations overall.
Commissioner Vince Perez has been pushing for the jail cost review overall. Monday he said that contract, which auto-renews every year, had just been categorized as a revenue source and never really looked at to see if it was cost effective.
Perez argued that without proper tracking of how many are being booked into the jail on these violations, it could just be costing the taxpayer more money overall.
“The population of the jail has an impact on staffing,” Perez said. “And so these are things I believe need to be looked at very carefully to ensure taxpayers aren’t paying more than necessary for things that can be settled outside of jail.”
No action was taken Monday, and Perez asked that the agenda item be deleted until more research can be done and data gathered. Perez and other commissioners suggested that community service could be used for those violations instead in the future though. But a police spokesman told ABC-7 he’s not aware of any other option for police to deal with municipal warrants beyond booking them into the county jail.
