Jake Browning
reporter@thefranklinpress.com
There were a lot of decisions to be made about how inmates are handled in Macon County at this week’s meeting of the board of commissioners.
The Macon County Board of Commissioners voted to fund a “sally port,” a secure portal for transporting inmates in and out of the courthouse. The structure of the port would include a curved chain link fence behind the courthouse that would cost $37,567 from the county’s fund balance.
Sheriff Robert Holland said a sally port would prevent inmates from escaping and endangering everyone involved in their recapture.
“I believe this is a public safety issue,” Holland said. “Not only for the safety of the public, but for the safety of my officers.”
Holland cited a recent incident in which a woman got loose from an officer immediately after her sentencing. The ensuing search interfered with other police operations that night, and the department committed to enhancing courthouse security going forward.
The commissioners agreed that the port was an important update, especially given foreseeable upticks in the number of inmates that will need processing after North Carolina raised the age for juvenile crime from 16 to 18.
“We’re also going to have to be taking in many more juveniles,” said commissioner Ronnie Beale. “All jails are having a problem with people running any opportunity they get, and we all know that.”
Earlier, commissioners adopted an amendment to the detention center medical contract. The amendment directed resources toward the hiring of a registered nurse for the detention center by adding $3,033 per month to the existing $5,000 per month contract.
County manager Derek Roland said the money can be taken from elsewhere in the budget for the Macon County Sheriff’s Office and that the amendment would be much more cost-effective than any external source of medical assistance that the county had analyzed in the past.
“There have been multiple budget years in which we have looked at these different companies,” Roland said. “We have never seen a proposal that was less than $260,000 from one of these companies. Even at that $260,000 level, we never had the luxury of having a medical doctor on call and available to be at the detention center 24 hours a day seven days a week.”
Commissioners also discussed a contract with Mountain Area Transportation Services. MATS will begin helping with transportation of involuntary commitment patients. County attorney Chester Jones said this contract has been in the works since September, when the commissioners first handled a memorandum on the process by which involuntary commitment patients are transported under state law.
“We approved the first memorandum of agreement fairly quickly,” Jones said. “Even at that time, there was some discussion about possibly utilizing a third-party transportation provider in lieu of the sheriff at least some of the time.”
All the detention center measures were approved unanimously on a 3-0 vote, with chairman Jim Tate and Karl Gillespie absent.
The next meeting of the Macon County Board of Commissioners will be on Tuesday, Jan. 14, 2020.