La Plata County appears ready to end its 30-year agreement with the city of Durango to hold municipal inmates at the La Plata County Jail.
La Plata County commissioners will consider a recommendation from staff to terminate its intergovernmental agreement with the city at its regular meeting at 10 a.m. Tuesday, Megan Graham, county spokeswoman, said on Friday.
A letter from La Plata County Sheriff Sean Smith and county commissioners to Durango City Manager José Madrigal and Durango Police Chief Brice Current said the terms of the 1994 agreement, which have automatically been renewed each year, “no longer serve the County’s best interests.”
The development is the latest in a drawn-out dispute over housing municipal inmates that sparked in early August when Smith announced in a letter to the city the jail would no longer accept people sentenced to jail time over municipal charges. He said the jail lacks the space to house them, with the cap being 170 inmates.
City officials reacted first with confusion and then with the threat of legal action. City Attorney Mark Morgan told The Durango Herald people sentenced to jail in Durango Municipal Court, low-level offenders convicted of petty offenses or missed court hearings, account for less than 1% of the jail’s population and that they spend only one or two days in custody.
Smith said in mid-September the population at La Plata County Jail had fallen below the jail’s maximum capacity and the jail had continued to accept municipal inmates from the city.
Graham said on Friday the conversations between the county and the city were kicked off this summer by new state of Colorado standards addressing medical services and medical providers, inmate population capacities, and safe housing requirements.
After consulting with legal counsel and reflecting on the last several decades of the 1994 IGA, the county recognized “best practices, legal requirements (and) societal expectations” have changed, she said.
On Sept. 10, commissioners raised the daily rate to house inmates on behalf of the city from $78 to $142.65, effective Jan. 1.
Morgan, the city attorney, said on Friday the county’s persistence on rejecting municipal inmates is “curious.”
“We did our due diligence when they sent a draft over and they do not have IGAs with anybody else,” he said. “... It’s a little disingenuous because we know there are multiple other government agencies that are given access to the jail, and there’s no agreement for that.”
Graham said the county has an agreement with the U.S. Marshals Services but could not name an IGA with other municipalities in La Plata County such as Bayfield.
Morgan said the county’s new draft agreement and proposed obligations to the city is “shocking,” “onerous” and “over-the-top.”
“They wanted us to assume full responsibility for any records requests to them that involved our inmates,” he said. “I don’t know how you would do that. If someone (makes) a public records request for something that happened at the jail to a municipal inmate, we’re not the custodian of those records.”
He said the ongoing feud between the county and the city is a disservice to the community because the likely outcome of refusing to jail municipal inmates is more crime.
“Having access to the jail for municipal inmates is an early intervention that, over and over, statistics have shown prevent more serious crimes and longer incarceration rates by those similar individuals,” he said.
cburney@durangoherald.com
