Parish Council will hear more about fees for housing inmates

Morgan City Mayor Lee Dragna is on Wednesday’s St. Mary Parish Council agenda for another discussion about how much the parish should pay the city to house prisoners.
The Parish Council will meet at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the courthouse in Franklin.
The parish government pays Morgan City, Berwick, Franklin and Patterson $14 per day for each parish inmate housed in municipal jails.
Morgan City houses more than half of those parish prisoners because the second floor of its jail is arranged so that it can segregate female inmates from men.
As of Aug. 25, Morgan City had received $93,000 in reimbursement so far this year. In 2020, Morgan City received $163,000 of the $278,000 in parish payments for housing prisoners.
In an appearance before the council Aug. 25, Dragna told the Parish Council that the city government is losing money on the parish prisoners, partly because female inmates require female guards, who are in higher demand than male guards, Dragna said.
“Our jail was in a negative, and we traced it back to this,” Dragna said.
He asked for a $19-per-day rate, which he said is the amount needed to break even.
The additional $5 a day would have increased the reimbursement to Morgan City by more than $58,000 for the 11,659 prisoner days it recorded in 2020.
Parish President David Hanagriff suggested raising the reimbursement rate $2 to $16 per day with a 1% yearly increase, and then looking for a way to raise the reimbursement further next year.
“In right mind, I can’t go back to my council and say, ‘Hey, they want to give us half what we need to break even,’” Dragna said.
Also on Wednesday:
—The Parish Council could go into a closed-door session to get a report about a lawsuit over opioid abuse.
The parish government signed on to the lawsuit, which alleges that pharmaceutical companies didn’t act responsibly during the growth of opioid abuse in recent years.
Local governments hope to recover some of the money they’ve spent on first responder calls and other expenses resulting from an epidemic of opioid cases.
—The council will hear from Port of Morgan City Executive Director Raymond “Mac” Wade about port operations.
Wade has been making the rounds of local government meetings to report that four dredges will soon be working on port waterways at the same time for the first time ever.
Hopes are that the port can be re-established as a transshipment point for import and export vessels, especially those carrying Louisiana rice, after six years when sediment has reduced the main channel’s depth.