Seventy-Seven Percent of Voter-approved Sales Tax for a New Jail Has Been Spent on the Existing Jail

Whatcom Watch typically has two editions with candidate questions — this is the first in 2011, for primary elections (required where there are more than two candidates for an office); the second will be in October for the election candidates remaining after the primary.

In the course of thinking about the candidate questions I was working on some research for a potential article in answer to this question: “How has the county spent the taxes raised under the 2004 voter-approved sales tax increase to fund a new jail, and what is the balance in the jail fund?” See my summary below of the jail fund since inception in 2005 until December 31, 2010. The numbers are so striking that they formed the basis for two questions for each of the sheriff and county executive candidates. Their responses are on pages 4 and 5.

It may come as a surprise to you as it did to me that of the $17.9 million in taxes levied under the new jail tax to Dec. 31, 2010, only $3.8 million remain unspent. And that almost all (ninety-eight percent) of the expenses charged to the jail fund were current operating expenses. Why surprising? Because most people I talked to were under the impression that they had approved a new tax to pay for a new jail, not to pay current operating expenses. However, the 2004 initiative is quite clear that the funds raised can be used for current expenses — so the county has been acting in accord with the law. Always a good idea to read the fine print!

But further analysis reveals a distressing trend — the cost of running the county jail has increased from just under $5 million in 1998 to $11.9 million in 2010. This represents a compound annual increase of over 7.5 percent, more than twice the rate of inflation over the period.

It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that if you keep increasing one component of the county budget at a rate more than double inflation, especially when sales tax revenues were lower in 2010 than in 2006, pretty soon you will run out of money to do anything else. Consider what sacrifices taxpayers and county staff are currently making — one furlough day per month unpaid and cuts to pretty much all services.

Now I’m an accountant, no expert in incarceration — I’d never been inside a jail before Sheriff Bill Elfo kindly arranged a tour of the county jail for me. I’m just doing what I know how — analyzing the financial figures in order that people will know what’s going on and will have a reasonable basis upon which to make decisions. But I think it’s important that these financial trends are known and understood before public funds are spent which commit the taxpayers of the county to paying out even more in this regard, especially when the only solution the county is considering requires borrowing $65 or $70 million which will be a burden to county taxpayers for 30 or 40 years.

What are the underlying causes of this extraordinary increase in the costs of incarceration in Whatcom County? It can’t be crime rates, since these are down over the last five years, according to the Whatcom County Sheriff’s website. Surely this paradox — a decline in crime rates producing an increase in incarceration costs — should be investigated before any decision on how to proceed is made? Wouldn’t this be a minimum requirement of exercising prudent stewardship of public funds?

Not according to the Resolution 2011-14 passed by the Whatcom County Council at the April 26, 2011 meeting establishing the Whatcom County Jail Planning Task Force, which resolves “that the Jail Planning Task Force shall advise the Whatcom County Council on the right size, right location, and the financial impact of the new jail.” There is, apparently, only one option — a new jail. They just need to figure out how big to build it, and where, and how to pay for it. And the task force members get to work for free, since the Bellevue consultant’s report the county paid almost $1 million for produced a plan for a jail which would cost $150 million to build and even using a low rule of thumb for operating costs of about 25 percent of capital cost, would cost $37.5 million per year to run (against current jail operating costs of $11.9 million per year), or more than three times the already high level we spend on incarceration in the county.

Hopefully these civic-minded citizens serving without pay on the jail task force will do a better job than the consultants did for $1 million. It’s hard to imagine worse. However, how can they do a proper job when their mandate is so limited? Is anyone studying the underlying causes and potential solutions which would reduce the cost or even eliminate the need for a new jail? Has anyone been tasked with a zero-based budget which examines all underlying assumptions for validity? Apparently not — the extraordinary increase in incarceration costs over the last twelve years in the county are a given — now figure out how to build a new jail.

Let us hope the election and the jail task force process will prove to be an open and productive discussion in this regard. §

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