The Somerset County Jail is now under contract to board people arrested in Waldo County, an agreement that officials from both counties said gives them stability and potential financial benefits amid challenges facing Maine’s county jails.

The five-year contract, which went into effect Jan. 1, provides 40 beds at the Madison facility every day for Waldo County at a fixed rate, beginning this year at a total of about $1.47 million.

Waldo County Sheriff Jason Trundy said the new arrangement came about as Knox County announced, due to financial challenges, it was making its jail in Rockland a short-term holding facility and sending its inmates to Two Bridges Regional Jail in Wiscasset. Two Bridges is run by a unique regional jail authority and serves Lincoln and Sagadahoc counties.

Waldo County, which operates only a 72-hour holding facility and men’s reentry center in Belfast, had been working with Two Bridges and Knox County to board its inmates being held for longer, Trundy said.  

Knox County’s shift to Two Bridges left Waldo County looking for a more stable partner. Waldo County officials then approached Somerset County; the two had previously worked together to board inmates at the jail in Madison before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Contracting with Somerset County was significantly cheaper than boarding inmates at Two Bridges, according to Trundy.

“Counties across the state are experiencing all sorts of issues, especially around budgets, and the jails play a role in that because incarceration is incredibly expensive,” Trundy said in a recent interview. 

“Finding a way to get this long-term contract,” he said, “it creates steady income and predictability for Somerset, because they know that they’re going to have this income coming in from Waldo County to offset their tax burden for the next five years, and they know that it’s going to grow at a specific rate over the next five years. And it’s good for us because we know that it’s controlling our costs for the next five years.”

Somerset County Sheriff Dale Lancaster agreed the fixed revenue is a benefit to his budget, too.

The Somerset County Jail, opened in 2008, was purposely built with a larger capacity to accommodate revenue-generating boarding contracts with other counties and the federal government. It has a rated capacity of 229, although Lancaster said that is a raw number and the actual capacity depends on classifications of people being held and other factors.

Somerset County officials determined they could hold Waldo County’s population without increasing staffing levels, County Administrator Tim Curtis said. 

The jail has 67 budgeted staff positions, of which 36 are corrections officers, a job with a notoriously high turnover rate across Maine counties.

“It kind of gives us some stability to become fully staffed, and that’s really what we’re watching over the next year,” Curtis said in a recent interview. “We believe, with the staffing that we have currently, we can move people around and move shifts around to be able to facilitate these Waldo beds.”

Under the new contract, Waldo County will pay Somerset County for the 40 beds, regardless of whether it actually sends that many people to the jail. The contract does not allow for refunds.

In 2026, Somerset County will charge Waldo County a daily rate of $95 per male inmate and $135 per female inmate. The flat-rate for 40 beds is calculated based on a capacity of 34 men and six women.  In general, the majority of people in jails are men; Curtis said many Maine jails are not set up to hold a large number of women, so boarding women at other jails is common in other agreements among county sheriffs. 

For the first year, that totals approximately $1.47 million paid to Somerset County. Under the contract, the rate is set to increase each year by 5%: a total of $1.55 million in 2027, $1.63 million in 2028, $1.71 million in 2029 and $1.79 million in 2030.

If Waldo County averages sending more than 40 people to the jail in a given month, the contract allows Somerset County to charge an additional daily boarding fee.

The contract does not include Sublocade medication-assisted treatment: Somerset County is to bill Waldo County monthly at a rate of the cost of the medication plus 5%. The medication is a monthly dose of buprenorphine, used to treat opioid addiction. Somerset County’s successful offering of the treatment at its jail has drawn praise from researchers and has received national attention.

Medical services for Waldo County’s inmates will be paid under Somerset County’s contract with Alternative Corrections Healthcare, although costs the provider does not cover over $100 will be billed to Waldo County.

Waldo County will transport its inmates to and from the jail, unless otherwise arranged in advance.

If a Waldo County inmate is taken to a hospital, Waldo County will send security personnel within six hours. If Waldo County does not, Somerset County will charge $35 per hour to cover its personnel expenses. Somerset County will make “every effort” to transport the person to a hospital as close to Waldo County as possible.

The contract allows for termination by either county with or without cause, but 90 days notice is required.

Trundy said Somerset County and Two Bridges structure their contracts differently, but Two Bridges came out to be about $200,000 more expensive for this year.

He said Somerset County’s programming is a good fit with what Waldo County offers at its reentry center. The court system’s embrace of videoconference technology has made the geographical aspects of boarding inmates less of a challenge. And, Madison and Wiscasset are the same distance from Belfast, about 53 miles; if anything, Trundy said, there is less traffic driving to Madison than Wiscasset during the summer.

“We are in a position where we desperately need other facilities to help us with boarding our inmates,” Trundy said. “Somerset didn’t try to take advantage of that. They gave us a really fair rate and treated us really well.”

Curtis said the contract revenue will be significant for Somerset County’s budget. 

Jail spending in the current fiscal year’s budget totaled approximately $11.72 million, with property tax funding $6.9 million. The rest was offset by other revenue, including an anticipated $1.04 million in boarding agreements with other counties, up from a budgeted $465,000 the year prior.

That figure comes from agreements to board inmates from other counties with overcrowded jails, such as Androscoggin and Penobscot. In recent years, Waldo County has not sent enough inmates to factor into the budgeted boarding revenue, Curtis said.

The Waldo County contract is unique compared to other agreements because of how formal and long-term it is, he said.

At the Somerset County commissioners’ Dec. 17 meeting, before a closed-door executive session to discuss the contract, Curtis stopped short of guaranteeing a tax reduction from boarding contracts.

“But I will say boarding outside inmates is something that the county must consider because it’s why the jail was built that way,” Curtis said, “and it may result in some property tax savings for the taxpayer if the boarding contracts are established efficiently.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect that the Two Bridges contract to board inmates would be $200,000 more this year.