Jail officials scrambling for beds, bucks

The Kootenai County sales tax will drop to 5 percent starting Dec. 1 because voters Tuesday rejected continuing an extra half-cent charge to pay for a $50 million jail expansion.

Yet the need for more cells, especially those to house and segregate the most high-risk inmates, hasn’t disappeared just because locals didn’t want to use the local-option sales tax to pay for the facility.

The County Commission is scrambling to figure out how to find the money to expand the jail, which is on the brink of overpopulation, while at the same time looking at making cuts in services to pay for busing inmates out of state.

Sheriff Rocky Watson expects any day to start transporting some of the county’s maximum security inmates to jails in Eastern Washington and western Montana to avoid lawsuits.

“We are flirting on the edge of that right now,” Watson said Wednesday. “We have to do something to make the jail work and keep the inmates safe.”

The county has no money in its budget for those transportation and housing costs, which are estimated to total $1.8 million in 2006 and $2.4 million in 2007. County finance director David McDowell said those costs will do nothing to solve the overcrowding problem at the jail. “These are just dollars going out the window,” he said.

Commissioner Katie Brodie said the county will have to look at the mandated needs versus the “feel-good” services provided to taxpayers, and set priorities to make cuts.

As for finding the money to expand the number of cells, Brodie and the other commissioners agree that it’s likely they will ask voters next November to pass a local option sales tax. By law, the county has to wait 51 weeks to rerun the ballot issue.

The county also could ask voters to pass a bond to pay for the jail expansion or wait until a judge demands a bond to alleviate overcrowding.

Brodie said the commission needs to meet with the people who were against the $50 million expansion and see if they can reach a consensus. She said it’s unlikely the price tag will be reduced because construction costs grow each year.

The main opposition to the jail measure was the powerful business lobby Concerned Businesses of North Idaho, which last month asked the commission to take the proposal off the ballot, study the costs more and then offer it to voters in May.

Board member Brad Dugdale said the business group agreed that a jail expansion is needed and the sales tax is the best way to pay for it, but thought the $50 million cost was too high.

The nearly 6,000 vendors who collect sales taxes in Kootenai County will get letters from the county next week explaining that Nov. 30 will be the last day to collect the extra half-cent sales tax that is paying off a previous $12.5 million jail expansion passed in 2000.

That local-option sales tax deal included an equal amount of property tax relief. Now that the half-cent sales tax is going away, so is the property-tax relief—meaning property taxes will increase by $2.5 million in fiscal year 2006 and by another $2.5 million the following year.

Brodie hopes the failed measure won’t hurt attempts to encourage the Idaho Legislature to expand the local-option sales tax so it could pay for various government projects other than jails while providing property tax relief.

Sen. John Goedde, R-Coeur d’Alene, doesn’t think the defeat will change how state lawmakers view the local-option sales tax. He said it will only prove the tool is working and that local voters are capable of deciding whether they should tax themselves.

He intends to submit a bill that would expand the local-option sales tax, yet he doubts it will go anywhere this session. That’s because the idea failed last week to get out of the interim legislative committee on property tax reform.

“But that doesn’t mean I stop trying,” Goedde said.