AUBURN — Two weeks after rejecting a bid from the Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department to buy five vehicles, a sharply divided commission denied a proposal to add funds to the vehicle repair account that would have allowed the fleet to run for another year without new cruisers.

With a potential financial crisis facing the county including a projected $200,000 deficit in the Androscoggin County Jail budget, the three Republicans — Brian Ames of Lewiston, Garrett Mason of Lisbon and Sally Christner of Turner — voted against buying the five cruisers, even though they were included in the budget.

The three Democrats at the meeting earlier this month — Chairman Andrew Lewis of Auburn, Roland Poirier of Lewiston and Jane Pentheny of Poland — supported the purchase. The motion failed in a 3-3 vote with Democrat Shukri Abdiraham of Lewiston absent.

With no Republicans willing last week to reconsider their earlier vote, that left the proposed vehicle purchase dead.

“This is not the year to do this,” Mason said. “I’m still a no. I’m concerned about our fund balance, and we’re going to need every dollar we can get.”

Mason said his choice wasn’t against the vehicles or the sheriff’s office. “We have to find all the money that we can to be able to cover our funds.”

“For 10 years I’ve always voted in favor of anything that would help the department,” Christner said. “I’m firmly against because we’ve had a huge shift in circumstances. We asked every department, please, no new equipment until we know what is going to happen.”

When Chief Deputy William Gagne said some of the vehicles due to be retired needed work to stay on the road for another year, Christner proposed taking $25,000 from the first-year cost for the vehicles and put it into the vehicle repair account to help pay for transmission and other repairs. The remaining $44,000 would go into the fund balance and could cover about 20% of the jail deficit, she said.

That proposal failed 3-4 on another party-line vote. Mason and Christner spoke about the deficit, but the Democrats never mentioned the looming shortfall, still wanting to pay for the five new cruisers.

Because the money can’t be spent on vehicles or repairs, the entire $69,000 request will be placed in the fund balance.

The reason for the budget deficit is due to the flat funding the county has received from the Department of Corrections for the past four years. Handicapped in its ability to raise money, the county must rely on its fund balance to cover the jail shortfall, commissioners said.

If the county continues to use the fund balance to cover the deficit, which is expected to grow each year, that account will soon run dry, county Treasurer Clarice Proctor said during last year’s budget deliberations.

Proctor added that using the fund balance was the only legal way to cover the deficit because the amount owed is far above the cap that state statute allows counties to increase the budget.