County, city once again squabbling over money

Column By CHRISTY BUSBY
Texarkana Gazette

Texarkana, Ark., city officials owe $400,000 for their share of Lantz Lurry Juvenile Detention Center operations.

The money is owed to Miller County, which operates the JDC where young inmates arrested by city police and county deputies are incarcerated.

Miller County officials appear ready to file a lawsuit to recoup the money.

County officials say the center is in danger of closing because of a lack of funding.

It’s not the first time county and city officials have squabbled over money when it comes to incarceration space.

In the early 1990s, Miller County officials made a controversial withdrawal from the Bi-State Justice Building.

When it opened in the mid-1980s, the Bi-State Justice Building housed jail space, law enforcement offices, courtrooms, crime records and emergency dispatch for the two Texarkanas and Bowie and Miller counties.

In Miller County’s case, the Bi-State offered an answer to its 1939 jail atop the Miller County Courthouse.

The four governmental agencies were to share costs of the building’s operation.

But Miller County fell upon some hard financial times and bucked and nayed about its part of the Bi-State agreement.

As a result, Miller County pulled out of the Bi-State and relocated its sheriff’s department, records, dispatch and inmates to the courthouse facilities.

After repeated inmate escapes, along with consistently failing inspections by the Arkansas Commission on Jail Standards at the courthouse jail, county officials asked voters to foot a half-cent sales tax for a new correction center.

In August 2000, voters blessed the tax increase request and a $8.3 million correctional center was constructed along U.S. Highway 71.

Since 1985, it has taken three venues and untold millions of dollars for Miller County to get its adult jail woes corrected.

But in recent years, the juvenile detention center has been riddled with problems—staffing shortages and changes, alleged violent incidents against inmates and being dubbed a “facility in crisis” by state officials in February 2006.

Now, county officials appear to be on the road to correcting a lot of JDC problems and improving the center’s track record, save for the exception of the city not ponying up its financial share based on an agreement signed more than 10 years ago.

Some believe the county’s intention to sue the city and make its leaders pay its way is counter productive.

“It’s like the county suing itself because most of the sales tax dollars are derived from within the city limits and 65 percent of the county’s population lives within the city” someone told me Friday.

But on the flip side, Texarkana, Ark., officials were telling Miller County officials “a deal is a deal” as Miller County made an abrupt departure from the BJB in the early 1990s, negating its end of the deal.

Sadly, it appears we haven’t learned from history as it’s repeating itself.

Now, it’s Miller County’s turn to tell Texarkana, Ark., a deal is a deal when it comes to the Juvenile Detention Center funding.

It would behoove everyone in Miller County, particularly our elected officials, to realize it’s not an “us versus them” or “city versus county” mentality.

The two are wed together legally and financially ... much like a ball and chain.

Let’s make it a good, mutually productive governmental union instead of an adversarial, wasteful one.