Wednesday, December 13, 2000
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Wednesday, December 13, 2000 |
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Jail fees a dead issue?
By DAVE HAMRICK
The idea of charging impact fees to help pay for a new Fayette County jail appears to be dead, negating six months of wrangling by county and local city leaders. County Commission Chairman Harold Bost has spent the last week trying to negotiate new language for an intergovernmental agreement that would allow the impact fees, but without success. Impact fees are charged to developers to help pay the costs of new government services and facilities made necessary by growth. Levying the fees for the jail would pay about $1 million a year of the county's $4 million bond payments for the jail and a new courthouse. "This was just me trying to put something together," said Bost Monday, adding that he proposed a new sentence in the agreement that would leave the door open to the county charging per diem fees to the cities for prisoners under the control of municipal courts. City leaders, who feel their residents already are paying more to the county in taxes than they are receiving in services, are adamantly opposed to paying the per diem fees. Bost's first stop was Fayetteville, meeting with Mayor Kenneth Steele and City Manager Joe Morton. "They would not agree to that sentence being in there," he said. "We are not going to subject our citizens to be double-dipped," confirmed Steele Tuesday. Without Fayetteville's agreement, there was no reason to talk to leaders in Peachtree City, Tyrone, Brooks or Woolsey. The County Commission's vote to instigate impact fees for the jail, taken last May, was contingent upon all the cities participating. County commissioners could still approve the fees using the language that the cities have insisted upon, but Bost said he doesn't think that's likely. It's on the agenda for the group's meeting tomorrow night, but, "I would be opposed to it," Bost said. Since the impact fees originally passed the commission 3-2, Bost's opposition would probably be enough to doom the measure. "I don't think it is right for the revenue from the courts going into one coffer and the cost coming out of another pot of money," said Bost. During a recent joint meeting of city and county leaders, he said the county would like to have the option of charging fees for inmates either sentenced by municipal courts or awaiting trial in municipal court. He and Commissioner Greg Dunn said it has been the practice in some municipal courts to sentence people to jail if they couldn't pay their fines for minor offenses. "It doesn't make sense to spend $45 a day to keep someone in jail for a couple of weeks to collect a $300 fine," said Dunn. "We don't want to pay that $45 a day for a guy who had too many dogs at his house," he added. Bost said the cost could run as high as $300,000 a year. Fayetteville's Steele said that's just not so. "He thinks we only send them to jail if they can't pay their fines," he said. "But some of those people need to be in jail. We had one that came the third time in a row to his probation meeting under the influence of drugs. He was going to be out driving and interacting with the public, and he needed to be in jail." But the number of prisoners kept in jail by municipal courts is small compared to the taxes city residents are paying for the jail, Steele argued. Out of 241 prisoners on a day chosen at random, 11 were from Fayetteville, seven from Peachtree City and one from Tyrone, he said. "And we're [city residents combined] paying more than 50 percent of the cost of the jail," he said.
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