By Charles Owens
For The Bluefield Daily Telegraph
PRINCETON — A moratorium on exorbitant regional jail bills is now in effect in Mercer County.
The county has been dealing with excessively high regional jail bills for several years now, and the January bill alone was $241,000. As a result, the Mercer County Commission decided this week to place a moratorium on any regional jail bills above $100,000.
“We are saying that is all we are willing to pay,” Mercer County Commissioner Greg Puckett said Wednesday of the $100,000 cap. “Because here is the problem. It should not be the sole responsibility of the tax payers in the county to pay for the jail bill.”
Puckett said the moratorium on paying regional jail bills above $100,000 takes effect “immediately.”
County Clerk Verlin Moye was in the process Wednesday of preparing an official correspondence from the county commission that will be forwarded to the Regional Jail Authority informing the agency of the county’s moratorium.
According to Puckett, the county won’t pay more than $100,000 a month for housing inmates in the regional jail system, adding that the West Virginia Legislature must act to address the excessively high regional jail bills counties across Southern West Virginia are facing.
“This is the system that the counties were sold on two decades ago,” Puckett said of the regional jail system. “We are going to save you money by doing a regional jail. But that’s just not true.”
The monthly regional jail bill has long been a thorn in the side of the Mercer County Commission. The cost of housing a local inmate in the regional jail system has increased in recent months from $48 per day per inmate to $67 per day per inmate.
According to the West Virginia Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the cost per day per incarcerated inmate is based upon the pro-rated number of days an inmate is incarcerated and any other information the commissioner deems necessary. However, the agency’s website only includes data from 2023 with no statistics for 2024 or 2025.
Southern Regional Jail and Correctional Facility in Beaver currently holds inmates from Mercer, Fayette, Greenbrier, Monroe, Raleigh, Summers and Wyoming counties, according to the agency.
Puckett said Mercer County can’t afford to pay a $241,000 regional jail bill. He said the $241,000 January bill is more than the county spends alone on economic development, the Mercer County Airport or litter control efforts for an entire year.
“That one bill is more than all three of those programs for an entire year,” Puckett said. “Think of what we could do with that (money).”
There isn’t a county jail in Mercer to house inmates, who are instead housed in the regional jail system. The Bluefield Police Department and the Mercer County Sheriff’s Department both have temporary holding cells, but those facilities are designed to only hold an inmate for 24 hours until the inmate is transported to the regional jail system.
“To my knowledge there are multiple counties in the state of West Virginia that don’t pay the full assessment of the jail bill,” Puckett said. “I don’t know that they are punished because of that. It’s not like we are putting jay walkers in the Southern Regional Jail.”
While inmates from the cities of Bluefield and Princeton also are housed in the regional system, the cost of paying for the incarceration of those inmates doesn’t fall on the cities, but instead the county.
“We work great with our municipalities,” Puckett said. “We are working well together on projects and infrastructure, but they aren’t mandated to pay the jail bill. The county pays for it all.”
If the commission continues to pay the full amount requested each month by the Regional Jail Authority, Puckett said the county would likely find itself in a major financial hole.
“Now the crazy part is we are already $100,000 over budget,” Puckett said. “So at best we are still going to have another $500,000 to pay between now and July 1 because that will be the end of the fiscal year.”
While some counties may use opioid settlement dollars to pay for the monthly regional jail bill, Puckett said this is something he doesn’t agree with adding it isn’t an effective use of those dollars.
While home confinement and other alternative sentencing programs do save the county money, ultimately there are inmates who must be housed each month in the regional jail system pending trial.
“We save money by doing home incarceration,” Puckett said. “We save a significant sum of money by keeping people out of the jail.”
Ultimately it will be up to the West Virginia Legislature to solve the crisis, but Puckett said lawmakers to date have made little effort to address the exorbitant regional jail bills that are causing financial harm to the counties.
“The only revenue option we have is the tax payers,” he said. “And then what the Legislature will say is you have to live within your means. But how is that possible?”
Read more from the Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Here.
