AUGUSTA – A plan created by sheriffs and county commissioners as an alternative to the governor’s proposal to unify county jails has gone to the Maine Legislature.

The counties’ plan would shift millions of dollars in county debt to the state, which would get a new bureaucracy to administer: the Maine Jail and Community Corrections Authority.

By 2009, county leaders estimated they could save more than $4.6 million by coordinating empty beds, prisoner transfers and purchasing.

State leaders estimate saving $7 million in the first year. Most of that would come from withholding $5.6 million in promised community corrections funds to the counties.

“I didn’t come here to duel with the state’s plan,” Waldo County Sheriff Scott Storey said Wednesday. He presented the new proposal Wednesday to the Legislature’s Criminal Justice Committee with George Jabar, a Kennebec County commissioner.

“The system needs to be working as a system,” Storey said. “Right now, it’s not.”

Each of Maine’s 15 jails would continue to operate as they do. However, the authority would oversee operations statewide.

The jail authority would lower the cost of boarding one county’s inmates in another county, stabilizing budgets, Jabar said. Budgets would be aided further by the absence of loan payments on their jails.

Future construction would be at the discretion of the authority and paid for by the state, Storey said.

However, the county plan would delay new jail construction until at least 2015. The governor’s plan proposes the building of a new 500-bed facility in Washington County by 2011.

The state plan would take over Maine’s jails in July.

Jails in Oxford, Franklin, Kennebec, Waldo and Piscataquis counties would be downsized. Their capacities would be reduced, and they would serve as a three-day holding area for new prisoners.

In all, 10 of the state’s 15 jails would function much as they do now, holding both pretrial and convicted inmates. Androscoggin and Knox counties jails would be made into pretrial-only facilities, shipping prisoners to other parts of Maine after their trials are over. The state would also lay off at least 116 county workers.

Belt-tightening already

Individual counties may face massive struggles of their own.

Already, counties are preparing for the sudden loss of community corrections funds and state jail money that’s incorporated into their budgets. Every Maine county budgets on a fiscal year that begins on Jan. 1.

On Wednesday morning, while Storey and Jabar prepared for their presentation, Androscoggin County commissioners worried over their budget, which could be hit by more than $600,000 if the governor’s plan went through as written.

“Not knowing what’s going to happen in July, we need to find every possible savings we can find,” Commissioner Helen Poulin said.

Poulin asked Jail Administrator John Lebel to carefully examine every cost – including requests for new uniforms for the jail guards – with an eye toward their need right now.

“I have to assume that the (state money) is coming back,” Poulin said.

However, the fight over the jails is far from over.

Even if the state manages its takeover, details of the transition are fuzzy.

Corrections Commissioner Martin Magnusson said that his master plan – with information on the transition, layoffs and costs – would likely be released next week.

And the Legislature is expected to chew on the issue for a while.

A public hearing on both plans is scheduled for Jan. 28 in Augusta.