PHOENIX - Arizona's facilities for locking up juvenile offenders appear headed for a dramatic overhaul.
Top state officials agree that something needs to be done but can't agree on what should be done, with one exception - force counties to pick up the $63 million cost.
While state officials say offloading juvenile corrections is critical to fixing Arizona's budget crisis, Pima County officials say absorbing the extra cost on top of the $20 million in state budget cuts they've already taken would force major cuts in other services, a tax increase or both.
On Monday, Gov. Jan Brewer sent Pima and Maricopa county officials a draft of a planned executive order creating a commission to identify the best way to shift responsibility for incarcerated juveniles to the counties by March 2011.
The Legislature, already scrambling to find ways to fix the budget, got further bogged down Monday looking for alternatives to Brewer's plan to simply shut down the Juvenile Corrections Department.
Senate President Bob Burns, R-Peoria, said there are too many details to be worked out to move as quickly as Brewer - who was previously pushing for an immediate shutdown - would like.
Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, wants the transition delayed until at least next March, if it happens at all.
What Pearce actually prefers is to have the state keep running the facilities and bill the counties for each youth committed to one of them.
Presiding Juvenile Court Judge Sarah Simmons said transferring inmates from state facilities to Pima County would put a strain on resources because youths held by the state usually are high-risk, high-need inmates who need long-term care and extra services.
The average stay at an Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections facility is seven months, Simmons said. It's 16 days at the Pima County Detention Center.
In January, 38 Pima County juvenile inmates were in secure care at Catalina Mountain, the state facility north of Tucson in Pima County, and another 48 youths were on parole, Simmons said. The county detention center does have the space to house additional juvenile inmates, Simmons said. The state has two other facilities in Maricopa County.
It cost the state about $6.3 million to house the 38 Pima County youths at Catalina Mountain for a year, said Martin Willett, deputy county administrator. Besides incarceration, that amount pays for long-term medical care and education, and efforts to rehabilitate juveniles who have been in the county system multiple times.
The county isn't equipped to start providing those more-intensive programs, Willett said, and doing so probably would cost more because of the economies of scale that the larger state operation benefits from.
"When this particular group comes back on us, they're expensive, and we're not even sure what we're going to need to do to try to emulate those kinds of services in Pima County," he said.
County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry said he doesn't know how he would recommend that the county cover the added costs.
County departments using general funds would be faced with either cutting another 7 percent or 8 percent from already-reduced programs - such as parks, the Sheriff's Department, courts and health care - or raising the primary property tax rate by about 20 cents per $100 in assessed valuation to cover the increased costs, Huckelberry said.
Supervisor Ramón Valadez said the state is setting counties up to take the blame for a tax increase that is being forced on them.
"Exactly where are we supposed to take this big a hit? The truth of the matter is this year, if there needs to be a property-tax increase, then the state needs to be honest and say, 'We are forcing the county to raise prop taxes,' " Valadez said.
Supervisor Richard Elías said that if the state shirks its responsibility, the county has no choice but to pick it up.
"I can't say exactly where it's going to come from yet, but something's going to have to give in order for us to take care of these kids," Elías said.
Supervisor Ann Day called it an "impossible situation."
Brewer said transferring responsibility for juvenile corrections isn't just about the money. She said there is evidence to believe rehabilitation programs work better when youths remain closer to home.
With lawmakers lining up in opposition, Brewer relented on her push for an immediate shutdown, but not on the goal. The commission, which she would appoint, would simply delay the process. But its stated direction in her executive order would be to figure out how to make the transfer, not whether it should be done.
The governor's plan does include some financial relief for rural counties - at the expense of Pima and Maricopa counties.
The proposal is for the state to take $20 million it intended to give to cities in revenue sharing and instead send it to the counties, with Maricopa and Pima counties required to give the state a total of $22 million this coming budget year to help run the system, with about $3 million of that coming from Pima County.
Pearce said the best situation would be for the state, which has the employees and the expertise, to continue to operate the system and just make the counties pay. He said there is precedent for that arrangement, noting that cities already pay counties for locking up people they arrest. |
