Hall County Commissioners will vote Thursday on agreements to house inmates for nine other local municipalities.
Hall County Sheriff Gerald Couch told commissioners at their work session Tuesday that the city of Buford and the town of Rest Haven had reached out to the county several months ago looking to renew existing agreements to send their inmates to the county jail. Couch said the sheriff's office wanted to take that as an opportunity to update several other agreements and make them all uniform.
"What we found, basically, is we're all over the place," Couch said. "Some of our agreements had expired some time ago and hadn't been renewed, some of them in over a decade. A lot of the wording and language was different and it was a very convoluted system, and very time-consuming for both our staff and some of the staffs of the cities."
Couch said that the oldest contract had not been renewed since 2004.
The new agreements, if approved by commissioners, would charge municipalities $60 per inmate per day spent at the jail, an increase over the $39 figure that had previously been charged to some cities. The agreements would extend to every municipality that is at least partially in the county, including Braselton, Flowery Branch, Gainesville and Oakwood and even cities that don't have police departments like Clermont, Gillsville and Lula.
"It's good to have those agreements in place. Something in one of those cities would be like if they issued a subpoena or citation for a city ordinance and there was a failure to appear. Of course, we contract law enforcement services to all those cities, so we would be the ones to go pick up that individual and take them to the county jail."
The agreements would last for one year and then be up for renewal. The items had been on several previous commission agendas, but had been tabled several times as Couch said officials looked to iron out the agreements with all of the municipalities.
