Ada County wanted a $49 million jail bond. Now lawmakers propose $3 million fix
Idaho doesn’t always have room for prisoners in state prisons, so it sends inmates to county jails. But the state doesn’t reimburse counties for the full cost, leaving those local governments to pick up the difference.
Now one lawmaker proposes to boost the state’s share. Rep. Bruce Skaug, R-Nampa, introduced a bill to raise the state daily payment rate to $80, compared with today’s $55 for the first week, $75 after. That still falls short of what it costs counties: over $100, according to a statement of purpose written about the bill. Still, Ada County Commissioner Rod Beck told lawmakers he would take what he could get.
“The bill before you is trying to make correction of a problem we’ve had for many, many years, where the state’s been balancing its budget on the backs of the counties.” Skaug told the House Judiciary, Rules and Administration Committee on Feb. 17.
The move comes in a tight money year. The state’s powerful budget committee voted to slash this fiscal year’s budgets by up to 4% and next year’s budgets by up to 5%. Skaug’s bill estimates that helping counties will add $3.1 million in state costs, though he told committee members that additional state prison beds will likely lower that number.
The Idaho Department of Correction is expected to bring over 1,000 new beds online over the next two years, according to spokesperson Ryan Mortensen.
This issue has been top of mind for Ada County commissioners. Ada County asked voters to approve a $49 million bond in 2023 to help address the congested jail, due in part to housing state prisoners. That bond failed.
“A big portion of the overcrowding in our jail is because of IDOC inmates,” Beck told lawmakers in 2023. Beck said at the time that the county jail averaged 140 state prisoners every day. “If those inmates were not in our jail, we wouldn’t be overcrowded.”
It costs $134 to house an inmate at the Ada County Jail, sheriff’s spokesperson Lauren Montague told the Statesman in an email. In fiscal year 2025, the Correction Department paid Ada County almost $4 million for inmate housing, Montague said.
So far this fiscal year, the department has paid over $16 million to county jails to house state inmates, just under $2 million of which has gone to Ada County, said Mortensen, the spokesperson, in an email.
In a statement, Ada County Sheriff Matt Clifford wrote that he supported the bill but that “I do recognize that increase is only slightly closing the gap.”
Skaug’s bill passed the House 59-10. The 10 Republicans who voted against it included Rep. Josh Tanner, a co-chair of the Joint Finance-Appropriations Committee. It now awaits a hearing in a Senate committee.
In an interview Wednesday, Tanner said he’d support the bill if there was available money.
“We really don’t have the funding to put that in place at this point in time,” Tanner said. “This is not the best year to try to do something like that.”
Lori Wolff, the governor’s budget director, said it would be tricky to implement the bill, if passed, without cutting elsewhere. She said lawmakers would need to pass a supplemental bill for the Idaho Department of Corrections to meet the financial obligation required by the legislation.
Skaug, the bill’s sponsor, was optimistic. “I believe the funds are there,” Skaug told the Statesman. “We need to pay the bills.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2026 at 4:00 AM.
