CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals heard arguments Wednesday morning over a dispute between the West Virginia Regional Jail Authority and the Webster County Commission.
Webster County owes the WVRJA $1.5 million of money that is more than 90 days past due and have not been making consistent payments due to steep budget cuts in the county.
“If you don’t have the obligation to pay, who pays?” Justice Brent Benjamin asked during the hearing.
In their Verified Petition for a Writ of Mandamus, the WVRJA argues that other financially struggling counties have found ways to meet their requirements for the jail bill.
They claim Webster County’s past-due debt is “roughly equal to that of all other counties combined,” which was true at the time of the filing. Since the filing, the rest of the state caught up and exceeded Webster’s past-due amount.
Conversely, it was Chief Justice Menis Ketchum who asked one of the hearing’s more loaded questions.
“You say they owe 3.1 million dollars (sic),” he said. “How are you going to enforce it? We don’t have an army.”
“The Court recognized that the Court does not have the power to compel the County Commission how exactly to fulfill the Writ of Mandamus,” Leah Macia, representing the WVRJA, said. “It only has the power to order them to do so.”
Webster County Prosecutor Dwayne Vandevender told the Court that the County’s budget has been cut as far as it possibly can be cut.
“If you look at our budget, we are doing the bare minimum that we can with the Constitutional offices,” Vandevender said. “We’re not funding libraries. We’re not funding fire departments. We’re not funding parks and recreation. It’s the Circuit Clerk, County Clerk, Assessor, Sheriff’s Law Enforcement, Sheriff’s Tax, and the Prosecutor. That’s it. That’s what we fund. We don’t have the money.”
The WVRJA is asking for a Writ of Mandamus to compel the Webster County Commission to come up with some sort of plan to begin paying down the jail bill, which the WVRJA claims has not been regularly paid since mid-2012.
“They are making sporadic payments,” she said. “They have not paid a full payment of their total bill, their total per diem, in quite some time. They are making payments sporadically.”
Macia cited a similar case out of Cabell County in 2007 to support her argument for a Writ–citing the Court’s thought that the matter was of “fundamental public importance.”
“The Authority is simply an instrumentality that the Legislature came up with to aid the counties in executing their police power to incarcerate. The responsibility for that incarceration still remains with the county.”
Vandevender argued that the money simply doesn’t exist.
“I don’t think any other county is going to want to go through what we’re having to go through,” Vandevender said. “And if they do want to go through that and they do want to cut their budgets the way we’ve had to cut our budgets and have our County Commissioners mow the lawn and take out the trash and us clean out our offices, then they probably need the same relief we do for this purpose.”
“Cabell County Commission had money to pay. They just didn’t want to do it. The difference is we don’t have money.”
Macia said these bills needed to be viewed as quintessential in the budget of County Commissions due to the legal obligations that each county has to the housing of detainees.
“County’s obligation to provide for the care and maintenance of inmates is not only statutorily based, it is also a Constitutional duty of the counties,” Macia said.
A decision is expected before the end of the year.