{"id":69158,"date":"2017-07-18T10:51:30","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T16:51:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/rural-colorado-counties-spending-hundreds-of-thousands-on-jail-overflow\/"},"modified":"2017-07-18T16:51:30","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T16:51:30","slug":"rural-colorado-counties-spending-hundreds-of-thousands-on-jail-overflow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/rural-colorado-counties-spending-hundreds-of-thousands-on-jail-overflow\/","title":{"rendered":"Rural Colorado counties spending hundreds of thousands on jail overflow"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"The
The control room of the Archuleta County jail flooded in May 2105 and forced the detention center to close. Prisoners are being housed at the La Plata County jail, which cost Archuleta County more than $200,000 in 2016.<\/span>File photo courtesy of Pagosa Springs Sun<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

DENVER \u2013 Counties across Colorado are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to send inmates across county lines for incarceration, government officials said Monday at the first County Courthouse and County Jail Funding and Overcrowding Solutions Interim Study Committee.<\/p>\n

Darius Allen, county commissioner for Alamosa County, said his county spends an estimated $500,000 a year from its reserves to house prisoners in facilities outside of its borders.<\/p>\n

\u201cWay things are going now, with the housing costs of inmates outside of our county \u2026 Alamosa County will be broke in four years,\u201d Allen said.<\/p>\n

Archuleta County has a similar problem because its jail was condemned in April 2015, said Sheriff Richard Valdez. The county now transports prisoners who are unable to post a bond or are serving extended sentences to La Plata County.<\/p>\n

Housing inmates in La Plata County jail cost Archuleta more than $200,000 in 2016 and is estimated to cost more than $250,000 in 2017, Valdez said. These costs did not include the cost of transportation and staff hours for the two law-enforcement officers required for each trip. \u201cIt\u2019s an extremely big deal,\u201d Valdez said, not only because of the costs but also the risks in transporting criminals.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 If something happens, where\u2019re the liability issues going to fall?\u201d said Ronnie Maez, Archuleta County commissioner.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a certain amount of pride. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m giving another county our problems, and I don\u2019t like that. We need to take care of our own problems,\u201d Valdez said.<\/p>\n

Valdez added that transporting prisoners to La Plata County is not sustainable for Archuleta County, so officials plan to ask voters to fund a new jail. The estimated cost is $17.5 million.<\/p>\n

Counties are required by law to provide a jail and a court. The state pays for operations, salaries and other expenses for the courts, but it does not provide funding to build or maintain these facilities.<\/p>\n

Lacking the tax base common in more populous counties, it is difficult for rural areas like Archuleta, which has a population of 12,800, to afford jails and courthouses as required by state law.<\/p>\n

Valdez said he hopes the committee will consider the financial difficulties of small communities when drafting legislation from its series of five hearings over the summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe primary thing is to recognize we\u2019re rural communities, and rural communities are lacking resources and that we just don\u2019t have the funding that some of the large communities do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Sen. Don Coram, R-Montrose and chairman of the committee, said Monday\u2019s hearing showed him that overcrowding and underfunding are not unique to rural Colorado.<\/p>\n

\u201cCrime doesn\u2019t restrict itself to county borders,\u201d Coram said.<\/p>\n

Terry Hart, Pueblo County commissioner, said his county struggles with overcrowding to the point that it no longer houses criminals from the city of Pueblo or those convicted of misdemeanors, even if they are jailable offenses.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are very limited in what we can do. We would love to put a sign up saying \u2018no vacancy,\u2019\u201d Hart said.<\/p>\n

Instead, Pueblo is actively looking for open beds in other county jails in what Hart describes as a \u201cbidding war\u201d to house inmates. This includes an agreement with Douglas County to jail repeat shoplifters<\/a> who would be released without serving their sentence.<\/p>\n

The courthouse and jail funding committee will meet again July 21.<\/p>\n

lperkins@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Archuleta County expects costs will top $250,000 in 2017<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":69159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[493,94,21,13,28,1024,29,533,934],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-69158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-archuleta-county","tag-colorado-state-government","tag-cortez","tag-frontpage-lead","tag-headlines","tag-la-plata-county-jail","tag-newsletter","tag-prison","tag-state-sen-don-coram"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69158\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69158"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=69158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}