These prisoners are

not angels, but the fact their case was handled by a municipal court generally

indicates their offenses were traffic offenses or violations of municipal

ordinances. Let's face it, all the really bad stuff goes to state court

(for misdemeanors) and especially the superior court (for felonies). Felons

end up in the state prison system, not in the county jail.

There is not the opportunity

for crime in the unincorporated part of the county that there is in the

cities. By and large, the unincorporated part of the county is Dullsville,

and the action is in the cities. There aren't too many banks to be robbed

out in the country, and not too many stores in which to engage in shoplifting,

credit card fraud, or other shenanigans. I suspect most of the people

in our Fayette jail were arrested in one of our cities. From that standpoint,

city residents are getting their money's worth from the jail. Unincorporated

county residents probably aren't.

What seems to gall

the commissioners the most is this. Let's say a municipal court imposes

a fine of $500. If the defendant pays it, the city keeps the $500. But

if the defendant can't pay, he is sent to the county jail where the county

gets to spend about $45 a day for his upkeep, for whatever number of days

the city judge said.

This is a kind of

"heads I win, tails you lose" situation for the cities. When

the fine is paid, the city keeps it; when it isn't, the county pays the

prisoner's room and board.

The cities try to

make hay from one complicating factor though it does not change things

much. Under state law, many court fines come with surcharges, like a kind

of sales tax or SPLOST. Georgia code section 15-21-93 provides for one

surcharge of 10 percent of the fine which goes toward county jail staffing

and construction. The money comes from the city taxpayers only to the

extent the people who appear before the municipal court are local, and

we know a great many of them were just passing through (perhaps a tad

too fast).

Is it wise for the

county to open wide the doors to the county jail and to tell the cities,

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe

free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore"? (Oops, actually

that's on the Statue of Liberty.) Running the jail costs the county taxpayers

money, and it behooves our municipal court judges to use moderation and

good judgment before they send folks to jail.

My own suggestion

to the county commissioners has been that they set a reasonable allowance

of so many prisoner-days a year for each city (perhaps based on the contribution

from each city out of the 10 percent surcharges in the previous year),

with excess days to be paid for out of the city's funds from fines and

forfeitures. People rent cars that way. You exceed your allowance and

you pay extra.

The county has apparently

attempted to hold talks with each city separately. I can see two good

reasons for that: (1) each city's situation is different, as Fayetteville

has many stores and Tyrone has virtually none, with Peachtree City in

between, and (2) the fewer people in a discussion, the calmer it can be.

I don't see why the commissioners ought to let the cities gang up on them,

like the cities are doing with the so-called tax equity question.

Here's what's most

amazing in all of this. Personally, I don't see how newcomers to the county

who will pay for the jail through bond repayments over many years ought

to be made to pay twice by having to pay impact fees up front. I consider

impact fees for facilities not already built a bad idea, and I doubt we

can measure with appropriate precision the impact each newcomer is making.

It does not bother me one bit that the cities should be blocking the imposition

of impact fees.

I wish, however, that

the political leaders of our cities were a bit more civil and understanding

than they are. They are throwing statistics at the county and posturing

about protecting taxpayers while all they are doing is wasting taxpayer

money on their disputes. They are not setting a good example. The cure,

as I have intimated before, might be to convert the whole county into

a city-county like Columbus, Augusta or Athens. There the citizens know

where the buck stops.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayette County

[email protected]