On March 28, the Senate passed LD 1614, an emergency bill to approve an additional $2.4 million to support the county jail system.

The House had passed the bill on March 23. Now, LD 1614 goes to the Special Appropriations Table, where the Joint Appropriations Committee will decide if there are sufficient funds in the budget to pay for the bill. That won’t happen until the last few days of the session, probably around the end of May.

Mark Westrum, administrator of Two Bridges Regional  Jail in Wiscasset, isn't getting too excited yet. “We got to this point before,” he said. “And then Appropriations didn't fund us at the level the Legislature mandated.”

Even if the committee funds the measure, it will still have to survive a possible gubernatorial veto, and because the Senate passed a motion rather than taking a roll call vote to pass the legislation, there is no way to tell now whether the votes are present in the Republican-led Senate to override a veto. The votes are there in the House, if everyone votes as they did on March 23.

There is $72 million in surplus this year, but Gov. LePage wants a lot of that to go into rainy-day savings, some of it is already spent, and there are several other important bills also waiting for funding, including LD 1496, which would create drug treatment programs in rural Maine and LD 1343, which gives current Maine National Guard members free tuition at University of Maine.

Also up for funding is LD 1530, which would correct a service provider sales tax bill aimed at telecom and cable television companies, but which was also accidentally applied to medical and mental health service providers. Rolling that back will cost about $6.7 million.

Westrum said that even if the bill is funded and makes it out of Augusta, because of the way PL 335, which did away with jail consolidation, was written, there is no guarantee that Two Bridges will even see any of the money.

“The sheriffs take their share for what used to be community corrections,” he said, referring to the Community Corrections Act. It was designed to be a diversion program to keep offenders either in the community with supervision or in local jails for longer periods of time instead of being sent to state prison. Those programs still exist, but the amount the state pays for them has been cut in half, roughly, while the expenses — pretrial services, monitoring, drug or alcohol treatment, day services, and halfway houses — have increased.

“By the time the sheriffs have taken their community corrections budgets from what the state sends, there is little extra for the jail.”

This is even though the jail is also providing community corrections, by keeping inmates at the county level for nine months instead of six, or housing inmates who have consecutive six-month sentences in the county system instead of sending them to state prison.

And because PL 335 forbids per diem fees transferred between jails, Two Bridges cannot recoup the expenses of taking inmates from overcrowded jails, such as Kennebec County Jail.

Instead, the jails would have to agree to a longer term arrangement, one that many overcrowded jails cannot afford.

Still, Westrum is trying to be optimistic. “Anything we get is going to be more than we have now,” he said. “And it’s money that is badly needed.”

On Monday, April 4, the Appropriations Committee voted out $11 million in spending that had already been approved, including the jail funding measure, LD 1614. The vote was 8-4, with all four House Republicans voting against. The remainder of the surplus, about $44.5 million, would go to the "rainy day" fund. The new budget bill is called LD 1606. The House planned to take up the bill on Tuesday evening. Because this is a supplemental emergency measure, it needs a two-thirds vote of both houses to pass. If it passes, LD 1606 goes to the governor for a signature.

This story has been updated.