By Roger H. Aylworth
Chico Enterprise-Record
OROVILLE, California — While the accommodations are rather less than five-star and the view is nothing to write home about, beds in Butte County Jail are about to become more sought-after as federal prisoners begin to take up residence.
Tuesday, the Butte County Board of Supervisors approved a contract with the U.S. Marshals Service to house up to 144 federal prisoners each day in the county jail.
Butte County Sheriff Perry Reniff told the board his department was in line to suffer a $1.9 million budget cut for the coming year that would have forced him to slash 48 positions and shut down jail space that could house 240 inmates.
While trying to overcome the fiscal challenge, Reniff discovered the U.S. Marshals Service was in dire need of additional inmate beds in Northern California.
He said while the county jail can house up to 614 prisoners, the daily inmate census has been hovering around 450.
The sheriff said the deal will bring $77.17 a day per prisoner. Reniff told the board he expects to have about 100 federal prisoners a day, which will bring in about $2.9 million a year.
He explained the added prisoners will not require increased staffing in the jail.
Besides erasing his department’s budget woes, Reniff said the remaining $1 million would go into the county’s General Fund, helping to reduce the $19 million deficit anticipated for the 2009-2010 fiscal year.
If the feds used all the contracted bed space, that would generate roughly another $1 million in General Fund revenue, he said.
Reniff said the federal prisoners will fall into three general categories inmates awaiting trial, inmates awaiting deportation, and individuals waiting for a bed to open up in a federal facility.
He told the board none of the federal inmates will be eligible for any of the programs, such as the work alternative program, that allow county prisoners out of lockup.
The sheriff predicted the individual inmates will be in the jail for a few months to a year.
When asked if the inmates will be limited to non-violent or white-collar crimes, Reniff said they will be facing every kind of charge imaginable. But he pointed out that 53 percent of the current county prisoners are considered high-security inmates.
The contract will run for three years.
Supervisor Steve Lambert, who represents the 4th District covering the southwest corner of the county, found another potential positive in the contract.
He observed that people will come to the area to visit the prisoners and will be staying in motels and eating in local restaurants, which will bring some new dollars to the economy.
Related to that point, Reniff said experience elsewhere has shown since the inmates are here temporarily, relatives of the prisoners don’t tend to move to the area.
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