County supervisors and the Columbus City Council have finalized an agreement to settle debt related to housing city inmates in Lowndes County Adult Detention Center.
Supervisors ratified the agreement at their Tuesday meeting. Council members approved the settlement in a special-call meeting Thursday.
Per the agreement, the city will pay the county $321,480 for housing its inmates since March 2025, when the city stopped paying for the service.
The agreement releases the county from paying its 2026 share of interlocal agreements related animal control, recycling, city-county airport operations and maintaining state highway interchanges. It also effectively releases the city from paying more than $190,000 for its half of E-911 services in 2025, according to County Attorney Tim Hudson, though that specific debt isn’t mentioned in the settlement document.
The two sides also plan to work out a new interlocal agreement for housing inmates at the county jail. In the meantime, the city will continue paying the rates laid out by statute.
Columbus paid a $25 daily rate per inmate before the city and county renegotiated the terms in September 2022. Under the new agreement, the city would pay fees on a graduating scale, starting with $30 the first year, $35 the second and $45 for the third year onward.
The attorney general’s office approved that agreement, then offered opinions in spring 2025 to Oxford and Clinton that state law caps the amount a municipality can pay a county for those services at $25 daily per inmate for the first 30 days and $32.71 each day thereafter.
Since March 2025, the city failed to pay the county anything for the jail, with Mayor Stephen Jones and City Attorney Jeff Turnage asserting the city was recuperating what it had over the previous 2 1/2 years, which prompted the county to send the city a demand letter in April for the unpaid amount.
Further, the county demanded $192,131 for the city’s unpaid share of E-911 expenses from Fiscal Year 2025. The two sides operated for more than 30 years on a handshake deal, evenly splitting E-911 costs that a state telecommunications surcharge did not cover. The legislature increased that surcharge in 2025 and prohibited counties from entering new interlocal agreements until October 2027.
Since there was no interlocal agreement in place, Turnage asserted the city could not legally pay the bill for FY 2025.
Jeff Smith, vice president for the board of supervisors, who presided over Tuesday’s meeting in president Trip Hairston’s absence, expressed his appreciation for the city and county putting the longstanding dispute behind them.
In a text message to The Dispatch, Mayor Stephen Jones echoed the sentiment.
“It’s always great when we can work together to resolve an issue that both sides had a legitimate concern about,” Jones wrote. “I’m just happy to get it behind us so we can move forward on a new interlocal agreement.”
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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