MORGANTOWN – “We’re pushing the panic button,” Monongalia County Commissioner Sean Sikora said. “We have to get a handle on this.”
The comments came in response to recent projections indicating the county is on pace to blow by the $2.2 million budgeted in the current fiscal year to house arrestees in the North Central Regional Jail.
And not by a little – by about 45%, or approximately $1 million, at the current pace.
When it comes to the regional jails, time is big money for West Virginia’s counties.
It’s the counties that are ultimately responsible for costs incurred by the state for housing and maintaining inmates who are pretrial or jailed due to misdemeanor convictions.
Following the passage of HB 3552 during the 2023 regular session of the West Virginia Legislature, county jail bills moved to a proportional formula calculated using a base daily rate set annually by the state and a county-specific number of inmate days based on population.
The current base daily rate is $57.46.
Under the formula, each county is given a pro rata number of inmate days calculated by multiplying its most recent census population (2020) by 0.52.
A county’s total jail bill is then calculated as follows using Monongalia County as the example.
Monongalia County’s pro rata number of inmate days is 55,027 (105,822 x 0.52).
For the first 80% of that number – up to 44,022 for Monongalia County – the county is charged 80% of the state’s base rate, or $45.97. The county is charged the full base rate between 80% and 100% of the pro rata number. Going beyond 100% jumps the daily cost to 120% of the base rate, or $68.95.
The county was notified in March that it had surpassed the 80% threshold, meaning it will be paying the full daily rate through June.
Sikora said the county didn’t hit that mark until May last year.
“So, just straightlining based on where we’re at now, it would appear that through April, May and June, three more months, we’re going to come in right about $3.2 million, and our current budget is $2.2 million, so that’s a big concern to me,” he said.
But the news gets worse.
Counties were notified last fall that as of the July 1 start of the 2027 fiscal year, the base daily rate is jumping 31%, from $57.46 to $75.44.
With the new rates in mind, the county upped its jail bill projection to $3 million for FY 2027 – a number that now seems destined to fall short.
“I’m going to be a broken record on this. This is something that the commission is really wanting to look at in the next couple months and through fiscal year ‘27 because we have to get this under control,” Sikora said. “Just doing business the same way isn’t acceptable.”
He called the expense a “non-value-added cost” to the county.
“If you look at 2023 – which that per-diem rate had been steady for a long time – to what the per-diem rate is going into 2027, it’s like a 70% increase over four or five years,” Sikora said. “That’s mainly to help the state get in line because they were hemorrhaging money. So they fixed the problem. They made big changes allowing for these yearly per-diem increases to fix their problem, but it just basically pushed it down to the counties. It’s forcing us to find local solutions.”
In the short term, the jail bill overrun will likely eat into the county’s carryover revenue and contingency resources.
Sikora said a local working group representing law enforcement, magistrates, judges, prosecutors and the commission is going to redouble its efforts to find ways to bring the county’s number of billable days down.
“We’re not there yet, but we just had our staff reports and we talked about a number of different things that we’re looking at. We’re going to hit this from two or three different angles and see, because we can’t just sit back and say, ‘Maybe it’ll get better.’”
