A request from the Platte County Sheriff’s Office led to a discussion on the proposed law enforcement sales tax early this week.
Major Erik Holland presented a request for proposals for inmate medical services at the Platte County Detention Center.
Holland said a couple of outside vendors operate in the detention center, in health and food services. Based on the current inmate population, the Sheriff’s Office has been notified of significant cost increases to both coming in the near future.
Presiding Commissioner Scott Fricker said as part of the preliminary work leading up to the decision to place the sales tax on the August ballot, medical costs at the jail were discussed. An area of concern in these calculations was estimates of 25-50 percent increases in health care costs in the next several years. Holland confirmed there were increases coming, and their calculations showed steep escalation in costs.
Holland said this is due, in part, to a movement in other states to use registered nurses (RN) in detention centers, instead of the current standard of licensed practical nurses (LPN). Missouri does not require RNs, yet, but as vendors are either nation-wide or regional entities the cost increase to hire RNs is spread across the industry.
Fricker said one of the criticisms of the proposed law enforcement sales tax is that it is too high and would generate too much revenue. Numbers provided by the Platte County Sheriff’s Office, however, showed the potential for shortfalls in revenue to operate the jail due to greatly increased medical costs.
“So to those that say this tax generates too much revenue, one of our main concerns is that we do everything we can to keep the county in sound financial condition,” Fricker said. “There may be excess revenue, there may not be excess revenue, but there are several variables in this.”
Those variables, he said, are the interest rates the county receives on the bonds when they are issued, how fast sales tax revenues grow and medical expenses.
“We put this model together as conservatively as possible, as a result it appears there are excess revenues,” Fricker said to Holland. “But if we used your recommended medical expense growth rates, they would disappear.”
Holland said the medical and food service contractors are both projecting increased costs, but medical services show the most extreme increases in costs. Food was close behind.
“Looking 20 years into the future is always interesting, because you never know what Jefferson City or Washington D.C. are going to do to impact finances,” Holland said. “We have not seen any sort of retraction of expenses.”
He said based upon the numbers provided by their current vendor and verified by another vendor, significant cost increases were coming and under some funding scenarios the county would go into the red trying to cover costs.
“So you could see a scenario where the sales tax dollars we estimate are not sufficient?” Fricker said.
“That scenario is possible,” Holland said.
Another area of concern is in inmate transportation and the county’s backlog of outstanding warrants, which Holland said is around 10,000 warrants.
“People get arrested a random times when they come into contact with law enforcement, and they’re not always local,” Holland said. “We’ve had multiple trips to New York, Florida, Chicago and Texas throughout the year.”
He said each time they need to evaluate the costs involved in either paying overtime to send deputies after these parties or whether to hire a third-party vendor to transport the party. Costs for those vendors have also gone up, with costs approaching $10,000 to transport just one inmate.
There are also a significant number of local pickups of inmates across the Kansas City metropolitan area.
There was also a brief exchange on the jail’s current population.
Last week, the detention population was at 210 inmates in a 180 bed facility, which, Holland said, does not include inmates held by Platte County but currently being housed in Buchanan County or elsewhere.