The juvenile house provides a place where juveniles can be detained.
By Gail Geraghty
Staff Writer

PARIS – Oxford County Commissioners agreed to renew its lease with the Department of Corrections on a building where juvenile offenders are temporarily housed.

The building also houses offices for the DOC’s Department of Probation and Parole.

Commissioners will be asking the DOC to pay $770 a month to use the building, located at the bottom of the hill near the county government complex where the Sheriff’s Department, the Superior Court and 11th District Court are located.

In the first five years of the lease, the DOC paid only $1 a year, since the state agency paid $46,200 to renovate the former single-family home that the county bought for $42,072 in 1996. The lease expires this fall.

The $770 per month figure reflects the renovation costs spread over five years, which Administrative Assistant Carole Mahoney proposed as a fair monthly rent.

“That sounds like a very fair offer to them,” said Head Commissioner Steve Merrill, saying the DOC would have a hard time finding a lower rate if they rented another house.

The juvenile house provides a place where juveniles can be detained, under supervision, for 24 to 72 hours while waiting to appear in court. The house also provides office space for the state’s juvenile intake workers and for the probation officer who works with adult lawbreakers.

Before the house opened in the fall of 1998, juveniles who were arrested were sent to the Cumberland County Jail, since the Oxford County Jail has no place to temporarily hold juveniles.

But that didn’t make sense for new offenders. The county contracts with Rumford Group Homes to operate a “diversion” program for juveniles in trouble, and the juvenile house acts as an attended-care facility while intake workers decide whether to take the offender to court or release the offender to his or her parents.

In other action, commissioners agreed to go forward with Phase One renovations to the courthouse that would provide a badly needed central filing area for all departments in the basement of the Superior Court building.

The budget for the work is around $55,000, Mahoney said. The work involves new cement, doors, steel shelving and lighting in a large area of the basement used for storage of mostly obsolete county property.

“We might have a sale,” said Merrill. Commissioners agreed to tour the basement and see what’s down there.