Wednesday, October 31, 2001
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Wednesday, October 31, 2001 |
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Cities vs. county on jail impact fees: Dispute wasting taxpayers' money Chutzpa has been described as killing both your parents and asking the court for mercy because you are an orphan. I wonder if we shouldn't consider giving our city governments, here in Fayette County, an award for chutzpa. I find myself reading in the local newspapers articles which report that city officials feel it's too bad the county is not collecting what is described as millions of dollars in impact fees for the jail. Yet the reason these impact fees are not collected is that the cities are purposely withholding their consent to their being collected. So why won't the cities agree to the collection of these impact fees? Because (as I understand the situation) the county has given one-year advance notice to the cities that it will not renew some existing agreement, now expiring at the end of 2001, to keep, at no charge to the cities and for whatever time the cities want, whatever number of prisoners the cities send to the county jail after conviction in their municipal courts. All through 2001, the county jail has been accepting the prisoners sent by the Tyrone, Peachtree City and Fayetteville municipal courts and housing them at county expense. These are not murderers, rapists, child molesters, kidnapers, bank robbers, drug pushers, terrorists (I had to say that), or hard-core criminals. These prisoners are not angels, but the fact their case was handled by a municipal court generally indicates their offenses were traffic offenses or violations of municipal ordinances. Let's face it, all the really bad stuff goes to state court (for misdemeanors) and especially the superior court (for felonies). Felons end up in the state prison system, not in the county jail. There is not the opportunity for crime in the unincorporated part of the county that there is in the cities. By and large, the unincorporated part of the county is Dullsville, and the action is in the cities. There aren't too many banks to be robbed out in the country, and not too many stores in which to engage in shoplifting, credit card fraud, or other shenanigans. I suspect most of the people in our Fayette jail were arrested in one of our cities. From that standpoint, city residents are getting their money's worth from the jail. Unincorporated county residents probably aren't. What seems to gall the commissioners the most is this. Let's say a municipal court imposes a fine of $500. If the defendant pays it, the city keeps the $500. But if the defendant can't pay, he is sent to the county jail where the county gets to spend about $45 a day for his upkeep, for whatever number of days the city judge said. This is a kind of "heads I win, tails you lose" situation for the cities. When the fine is paid, the city keeps it; when it isn't, the county pays the prisoner's room and board. The cities try to make hay from one complicating factor though it does not change things much. Under state law, many court fines come with surcharges, like a kind of sales tax or SPLOST. Georgia code section 15-21-93 provides for one surcharge of 10 percent of the fine which goes toward county jail staffing and construction. The money comes from the city taxpayers only to the extent the people who appear before the municipal court are local, and we know a great many of them were just passing through (perhaps a tad too fast). Is it wise for the county to open wide the doors to the county jail and to tell the cities, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore"? (Oops, actually that's on the Statue of Liberty.) Running the jail costs the county taxpayers money, and it behooves our municipal court judges to use moderation and good judgment before they send folks to jail. My own suggestion to the county commissioners has been that they set a reasonable allowance of so many prisoner-days a year for each city (perhaps based on the contribution from each city out of the 10 percent surcharges in the previous year), with excess days to be paid for out of the city's funds from fines and forfeitures. People rent cars that way. You exceed your allowance and you pay extra. The county has apparently attempted to hold talks with each city separately. I can see two good reasons for that: (1) each city's situation is different, as Fayetteville has many stores and Tyrone has virtually none, with Peachtree City in between, and (2) the fewer people in a discussion, the calmer it can be. I don't see why the commissioners ought to let the cities gang up on them, like the cities are doing with the so-called tax equity question. Here's what's most amazing in all of this. Personally, I don't see how newcomers to the county who will pay for the jail through bond repayments over many years ought to be made to pay twice by having to pay impact fees up front. I consider impact fees for facilities not already built a bad idea, and I doubt we can measure with appropriate precision the impact each newcomer is making. It does not bother me one bit that the cities should be blocking the imposition of impact fees. I wish, however, that the political leaders of our cities were a bit more civil and understanding than they are. They are throwing statistics at the county and posturing about protecting taxpayers while all they are doing is wasting taxpayer money on their disputes. They are not setting a good example. The cure, as I have intimated before, might be to convert the whole county into a city-county like Columbus, Augusta or Athens. There the citizens know where the buck stops. Claude Y. Paquin Fayette County cypaquin@msn.com
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