As the city succeeded in balancing a $1.5 million budget shortfall for next fiscal year, its detention centers will have less to spend on its prisoners.
According to the preliminary budget document for Fiscal Year 2015, the budget for the care of prisoners has been slashed by $50,000, dropping from last fiscal year’s $400,000 to the current $350,000. The city council approved the preliminary budget May 27.
Española Director of Public Safety Eric Garcia said the cut resulted during budget talks after the department identified that it is spending a lot less than what it allocated for prisoner care in Fiscal Year 2014. He said the cut will not impact the quality of prisoner care in the city.
“My job is to be as efficient as I possibly can,” he said. “By being as efficient, we reduced the expenditures. It’s not because our arrests are down.”
So far in the fiscal year, the city’s Department of Public Safety has spent about $118,000 for prisoner care, which is $322,000 less than the projected budget, according to the document. The fiscal year will end on June 30.
Garcia said that at the same point in the prior fiscal year, his department had spent $200,000 for the same line item.
But Garcia said that although there is a huge gap between the projected prisoner care budget and the actual money spent for it, he did not want to slash more money away from the line item. It’s because he wanted to play safe, he said.
“We have to evaluate if we’re going to get more prisoners or less prisoners and what the costs are going to be,” he said. “We can’t forecast that much in advance. Even though we have a cost savings set up at half, I don’t want to set myself up for failure and give up everything. We want to have a cushion there.”
The prisoner care budget encompasses spending on medical care and incarceration fees for prisoners, Garcia said. Four detention centers accommodate the city’s prisoners: one in Tierra Amarilla, one in Santa Fe, one in Guadalupe County and one in Taos.
The city pays a daily per-prisoner fee of $60 in Tierra Amarilla, $80 in Santa Fe and $50 in Guadalupe County, Garcia said. He said the city also pays a daily per-prisoner fee of $105 in Taos, but that center only serves as a “last resort” for the department.
Garcia said that in the past, centers were allowed to grant an extended hospital stay to prisoners who request it at their own discretion.
But he said that to save money on prisoner care, the department has limited prisoners’ medical care by requiring centers to seek approval for prisoners requesting extended hospital stays. This policy started last year, he said.
“A stay in the hospital could be quite an expensive deal,” he said. “So to alleviate that, I put the jails on notice that they have to notify me or my designee within a timely manner of the request of the person.”
Normal medical checkups do not require Garcia’s authorization.
He said in an effort to save money, the city has also been pushing for further electronic monitoring devices, such as ankle bracelets, instead of paying to incarcerate more people.
“I would rather pay all our part of electronic monitoring than have that prisoner stay in the hospital building up the cost on tax dollars,” he said.
City Councilor Cory Lewis agrees. He said next fiscal year’s prisoner care budget cut reflects the amount of money that can be saved through more electronic monitoring programs.
“It wouldn’t impact the care of prisoners,” he said. “I believe that by doing that, that’s going to save the city some money as far as goes the jail incarceration fee. I think it’s a great decision.”
But Mayor Pro Tem Pedro Valdez said that although he would be fine to try out further electronic monitoring in the meantime, criminals should not be deprived of jail time.
“We were going to try a new ankle bracelet that would work instead of sending them to jail,” he said. “I’ll support it to just try it out. But they’ll never learn if they don’t serve their time.”
Garcia said that although he is pushing for enhanced electronic monitoring, people who commit egregious crimes, such as first-degree drinking while intoxicated and domestic violence involving physical battery and verbal abuse, do not deserve to escape jail time.
He said he is hopeful that the need to incarcerate people in the city would decrease in the future.
“If we continue down the same track, I would be happy to give up half of my detention budget to show that we’re doing intervention and that we’re being efficient,” he said. “We can’t arrest our way out of a problem. We have to be as idealistic as we possibly can.”