A state plan to stop housing state inmates at county prisons threatens to blow a $1.75 million hole in Lackawanna County's budget next year and raises the possibility of an even larger real-estate tax than proposed.
Lackawanna County Commissioners Jim Wansacz and Corey O'Brien said they learned late Friday afternoon that the state Department of Corrections plans to pull its 50 inmates from the county prison over the coming months and return them to state prisons.
The news arrived in a letter from state Secretary of Corrections John E. Wetzel.
Mr. Wetzel said the state Department of Corrections started using county prisons to ease overcrowding in state prisons in 2009, but increases in available prison space and more stable inmate levels led to "a significantly reduced need for leased beds in counties."
"Accordingly, over the coming months, we will be returning (state) inmates from county jails," he wrote in the letter dated Friday.
Susan McNaughton, a Department of Corrections spokeswoman, said the state plans to open a new 2,000-inmate prison next year in Centre County, and the replacement of the state prison at Graterford in Montgomery County will produce room for 800 more.
Besides having more room, the state is releasing inmates eligible for parole sooner rather than allowing them to languish in prison, Ms. McNaughton said. It also plans to house parolees guilty of technical violations of their parole conditions in county prisons when possible.
Lackawanna is one of 14 counties whose prisons housed 554 state inmates as of last week. Of those, 32 are at the Wayne County Prison and the rest in county prisons outside Northeast Pennsylvania. All 14 counties were advised of the state's plans.
The state plans to ask the counties if they are willing to consider taking state inmates who commit parole violations as part of its efforts to reduce the number of inmates in state prisons.
Only last month, state officials projected doubling the number of inmates housed at the county prison to 100, Warden Robert McMillan said. That caused the county to raise its budget estimate for revenues from housing state inmates to $1,752,000 next year, he said.
The commissioners said they plan to review all options for replacing the money, including reducing staff and an additional tax increase, though they cautioned that it is too early in their review to tell for sure what will happen.
"Obviously, this got dropped on us now so we've got to try to work with the Department of Corrections and see what we can do going forward and plan to try to minimize this as much as possible," Mr. Wansacz said.
"There's a great deal of uncertainty," Mr. O'Brien said. "We're going to fully review this. We're going to reach out to the state and talk to the state to see what direction the state is moving in, and then we're going to adjust the budget as necessary."
The commissioners are already proposing raising the real estate tax by 2.42 mills to 57.42 mills next year. A mill is $1 of tax for every $1,000 of assessed property value. On a property assessed at the average of $13,000 for residential properties, the hike would raise taxes to $746.20 from $715, or 4.4 percent.
A mill of taxation raises about $1.2 million so $1.752 million is equivalent to about 1.5 mills in taxes, though that does not necessarily mean taxes will go up by that much.
Ironically, the commissioners had attributed part of the need for the increase to escalating costs of running the prison, which was looking to hire up to 30 new employees at an estimated cost of $1.19 million to comply with state and federal staffing mandates. The prison accounts for a quarter of spending in the county's 2013 budget.
"We're getting hit with all sides right now," Mr. Wansacz said.
Fewer inmates could mean not hiring as many employees, though some will have to be hired to comply with mandates, he said.
The loss of state inmates is not the first hit for the county prison in terms of inmates whose incarceration produces revenue. Last year, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement pulled its inmates, costing the county more than $3 million in revenue.
Contact the writer: bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com