It’s well past 8 p.m. in the Penobscot County Courthouse in Bangor. Members of the county’s budget committee are growing frustrated with the task at hand: trimming down an already lean proposed county budget.
“This has become so convoluted and confusing,” said District 1 Councilor Ellen Campbell. “I don’t feel I can vote on any of it with any kind of knowledge or confidence.”
This year, the committee is dealing with a roughly $7 million deficit in the county's undesignated fund balance that could result in a sizable property tax increase for more than 150,000 residents.
The bulk of the deficit stems from one department. The Penobscot County Jail had a $3.5 million shortfall as of the beginning of the 2025. Committee members repeatedly call it “the elephant in the room.”
Former County Administrator Bill Collins gets on the microphone and warns the committee that any surplus funds in the undesignated fund balance have all been used.
“There is no more money to take," Collins said. "You can go through your exercise tonight and I respect it, but you’re not going to find three-plus million dollars.”
County jail funding problems are not unique to Penobscot County. Aroostook County commissioners created a reserve account to address a nearly $600,000 jail deficit. In Knox County, the sheriff said the jail would relocate long-term inmates to save on boarding costs. In Western Maine, Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford Counties agreed to explore opening a shared, regional jail to save on transportation. Washington and Waldo Counties are also dealing with their own budget crises in part because of the rising costs of running their jails.
Bangor resident Susan Lessard used to be a bookkeeper for several nearby municipalities. Now, she’s a taxpayer that worries living in rural Maine is about to get much harder.
"Virtually everybody I know will be impacted," she said after attending the budget committee meeting. "Whether you are a renter and your rent has to go up to accommodate property taxes that your landlords have to pay... If there are large tax increases at the local county level, nobody escapes."
Why are jails so expensive?
Costs of municipal services naturally rise with inflation. Staffing often accounts for more than half of a jail's budget which stems from wage increases in collective bargaining agreements and recent spikes in costs for health care coverage.
But administrators say costs are also rising due to state-driven pressures local governments can’t control.
In 2021, the state legislature set the County Jail Operations Fund at roughly $20 million and put a cap on the tax assessment for correctional services. That allocation now covers around 15% of all jail operational costs.
"That $20 million has just been stuck there every year and has not caught up with the inflation costs of operating jails," said Sommerset County Administrator Tim Curtis who is a member of the Maine County Corrections Professional Standards Council.
Meanwhile, costs of providing healthcare for inmates is one of the fastest-growing line items in jail budgets.
Last fiscal year, the Penobscot County Jail spent nearly $2.5 million on medical care for inmates. MaineCare recipients lose their benefits upon arrest, so the costs for things like surgery, dental care or transportation to local hospitals then shifts to the county.
Of the roughly 1,600 people booked in Maine's county jails, Curtis said roughly 75% require some kind of mental health or substance use treatment.
“You may have never been in jail, but you've probably been to a hospital, and if you look at the county jail, it is run much like the emergency room of a hospital,” said Penobscot County Sheriff Troy Morton. “You don't know who's coming in, when they're coming in and what condition they are in. It's often some of the most expensive care there is because people are in critical conditions.”
The state has included funding measures for some mandates such as Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) for substance abuse disorder. The program was piloted in 2019 and received a $1.2 million allocation in the 2020 fiscal year.
But Morton says funding for individual mandates doesn't solve the issue of rising medical expenses across the board. Some counties, including Penobscot, have supplemented costs for MAT with their county's opioid settlement dollars.
At the same time, Maine has a large backlog of criminal court cases leftover from the pandemic which is leading to longer holding times in jails and overcrowding. In February, Maine Supreme Court Chief Justice Valerie Stanfill said criminal cases are still up 35% from pre-pandemic levels.
Morton says the one of largest line item on the jail budget — over $2.5 million — are contracts to board inmates in other facilities. He says it's a common issue in the most rural counties where the jails are over a century old.
"It's frustrating from our end, because we've been continuing to voice this over and over," he said. "Perhaps the urgency will now pique the interest of others, and we can come together to figure out a way to appropriately fund this without simply doing it through property tax.”
Is more funding the answer?
Addressing the jail funding problem is a legislative priority of the Maine County Corrections Professional Standards Council.
It’s trying to move two bills that would raise the County Jail Operations Fund by over $8 million and add safeguards for future inflation. The council is currently in the draft stages of a report that outlines root causes of jail budget increases and provides suggestions for further legislative action
Neither bills have made it to the voting floor in the past four sessions but Tim Curtis feels optimistic after the attention given to county budgets in the media this year.
He says a more balanced partnership between the state and its counties is the only way to fix the revenue stream and maintain inmate services without overburdening taxpayers.
“If the state dictates the laws, dictates the court system, dictates the standards by which the jails must operate, wouldn't you think the state would pay more than 15% of the cost?” Curtis said.
Maine's county jails follow nearly 250 individual standards in order to be compliant with state statute, Curtis added.
Meanwhile, some advocates say the answer isn’t just more money — it's keeping people out of jail in the first place.
Doug Dunbar leads a group that opposes a plan to build a larger Penobscot County Jail, a plan Morton said he's been pursuing for years to address overcrowding and the jail's aging infrastructure.
But Dunbar, who was previously incarcerated, said the root causes of most criminal activity are poverty, substance abuse and mental health disorders and that funding efforts should focus on creating community treatment centers.
“We've come to think of jails as places where people are supposed to languish for months and months... That was never the idea behind jails," he said.
"If the state gives them plenty of money, or they have a giant new building that they feel they should fill, we lose all incentive for diversion programs."
In November, Dunbar's group presented plans for "a diversion-based system that routes eligible individuals away from jail and into treatment, support, and accountability programs."
Both Curtis and Morton say they agree with efforts to break cycles of incarceration but said solutions should focus on providing the most immediate relief to taxpayers.
The Penobscot County Commission will meet on December 23 with a goal of cutting $1 million from the proposed budget. Even then, taxpayers could see a double-digit percent increase in the cost of their county government.
