FARMINGTON – Commissioners approved two six-month budgets Tuesday: $713,673 for the Franklin County Sheriff’s Department and $286,716 for the Communications Department.

Recommended cuts were made to the Sheriff’s Department request of $754,301 and Communications’ request of $316,505.

The county is moving from a calendar-year budget to a fiscal year, which begins July 1 and ends June 30 of the following year.

Currently, commissioners are working on the six-month budget that will cover from Jan. 1, 2009, to June 30, 2009, and will begin early in 2009 to develop a fiscal year budget for July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010.

The exact amount of the commissioners’ entire budget proposal for the first six months of 2009 was being calculated Tuesday.

The proposed budget will go before the county Budget Committee, which has an organizational meeting scheduled for Monday, Nov. 10, at the courthouse.

Prior to the meeting start, commissioners were presented with a letter from Franklin Community Health Network President Richard Batt stating the network will not be bidding to provide inmate health services at the Franklin County jail. The network will remain the interim provider until the bid is awarded to another agency.

The group will also cease its medical services to the jail on Nov. 28 due to difficulty in securing appropriate medical provider staff.

Franklin Memorial Hospital, affiliated with the Network, stepped in to have its subsidiary, Carrabassett Valley Clinic, provide health services that include weekly sick call and medication administration, after an appeal from the Sheriff’s Department in September. The agency that previously provided the service terminated its contract in late September.

“We have been providing this service since that time by hiring nurses and ‘borrowing’ provider staff from FMH on a weekly basis,” Batt wrote. “We have found, unfortunately, that we are not sufficiently staffed to appropriately continue this service. We have also seen that we would have to charge an amount that might exceed what the county is prepared to pay, and what a company that is experienced in this business might bid for it, in order to fully cover our cost, because this is not part of our traditional services,” Batt stated in his letter.

Joint requests for bids to provide inmate medical services for jails in Androscoggin, Franklin, Oxford and Penobscot were sent out last month.

In other business, commissioners approved a request from the Franklin County District Attorney’s Office to have its clerical staff work four-day weeks for a trial period from mid-November through the end of the year.

The schedules will be arranged to make sure clerical staff members are in the office each day of the week to meet the needs of the public and assistant district attorneys, Assistant District Attorney Andrew Robinson said.

The longer days will allow them to process administrative work before and after the office closes, and also provide them with a day during the week to tend to family or personal needs, Robinson said.

If the shorter work week is deemed successful, Robinson said, they may come in January to ask that it be implemented for a longer period of time.

Commissioners also voted to have Kachnovich Land Surveying Inc. do a perambulation of county lines between Jay in Franklin County and Canton in Oxford County. The price range is between $2,800 and $3,700, and will come out of a $10,000 reserve account set aside for that purpose.