What Are They Going to Do?

Hypothetically, what if you were a member of the Dodge County Board of Supervisors and had entered into an agreement to transfer the inmates from your county jail to somplace else? What if you did this because you were certain it was going to save your county hundreds of thousands of dollars annually? My guess is that you would feel pretty good about yourself and flout your accomplishment to your constituents.

What happens when you give notice to all of your employees, offer them severance packages, and hope the other county approves the deal? If  I was on the Board, I’d be thinking that I had done a pretty good job. All I have to do is make sure the other county approves the contract, begins providing services, and flout my accomplishments to my constituents.

What happens when the other county doesn’t immediately approve that contract, the commissioners have to wait a few more days, but because they’ve already offered their employees severance packages they have to extend the time of the contract for three more months? The savings start to drop, but I still feel pretty good about what I’ve accomplished on the Board, right?

What happens when it is revealed that the contract to take over the jail isn’t just a cut-and-dried contract to provide those operations? Rather, it’s a two-part contract so that Part I involves the housing and transport of inmates and Part II involves running the booking operation. Further, the contract allows you to cancel Part I of the contract if the other county doesn’t agree to do Part II of the contract. What happens then? Don’t you hope that the other county opts to accept Part II so that you can be done and continue to revel in your glory for savings hundreds of thousands of dollars?

What if the other county declines Part II? Aren’t you wondering why you didn’t have a lot of this taken care of before you started bragging about it to your constituents? Further, are you looking to rescind Part I of the contract?

This is the dilemma the Dodge County Board of Supervisors faces right now. The savings for Part I of the contract exist because of the personnel costs that were going to be eliminated by farming jail services out to another county. Unfortunately, for Dodge County Supervisors, Saunders County opted not to take part in the booking operations of the jail.

If Dodge County must provide booking services, there are no personnel savings. The jail needs three people to operate — regardless of whether it is a booking facility only or a jail. One person is in the control room to unlock doors, one person to escort prisoners, and one person to assist in operations and with unruly prisoners. It can’t be done any other way.

What are the Supervisors thinking now? Because the booking operations have been thrown back into their lap, they lose their savings for moving operations to Wahoo. Worse, they have no employees to run the booking operations after September 1 because those employees have been given notice and many of them have found different jobs. It now appears that perhaps there are zero savings (maybe even additional costs) in the decisions that were made by the Board of Supervisors in this fiasco.

So, if you’re a member of the Dodge County Board of Supervisors, you have to provide booking operations for the jail, you need to decide whether you’re going to keep the jail, you need to hire back 12 – 15 employees, and you have to tell the public that you’re latest decision may have just cost the taxpayers a significant sum of money, I have to ask the question, “What are you going to do?”