Columbus and Lowndes County remain at odds on how to handle $455,000 in invoiced jail and E-911 costs the city has neglected to pay for more than a year.
Short version: The county wants its money, city administration believes it shouldn’t pay it and city council members claim they knew nothing about the unpaid invoices until a few weeks ago.
In a letter to the city late last month, the county demanded $263,000 to help cover costs of housing city inmates in Lowndes County Adult Detention Center. That cost represented the $25 daily rate per inmate state law allows, said Trip Hairston, president for the county board of supervisors.
The letter also demanded the city pay its Fiscal 2025 share of $192,000 to operate the E-911 system.
Now, city council members, some of whom are criticizing “unilateral” decisions by the last two administrations not to pay the bills, are asking for a joint meeting with county supervisors to sort things out.
Hairston is open to a joint meeting, but if the city doesn’t pay what it owes, the county may pull out of other interlocal agreements it has with the city – specifically for animal control, recycling bins, mowing rights-of-way along Highway 45 and operating the Columbus-Lowndes Airport, for which the county’s share is about $164,000 annually.
“We could rescind those interlocals, … but you’re talking about peanuts compared to the half-million (the county is owed),” Hairston told The Dispatch on Thursday. “I really hope (it doesn’t come to that). … We serve the same taxpayers. If you’re not going to pay the bill, how should we proceed?”
Housing inmates
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.
A bill to make $25 per day the minimum instead of the cap, which Lowndes County endorsed, died in conference during this year’s legislative session.
After the AG’s opinions, Lowndes County continued sending invoices to the city at the $45 daily rate, Columbus Chief Financial Officer Jim Brigham told The Dispatch. He said he stopped paying the bills altogether in March 2025 – at the instruction of then-mayor Keith Gaskin and the legal advice of City Attorney Jeff Turnage – because the city had “overpaid” for those services to the tune of $165,000 over the 2 1/2 years it paid a higher rate than statute allows.
Brigham did not present those invoices to the council at any point, he said, not even after Stephen Jones became mayor in July.
“Our position is we overpaid them, and we’re just trying to figure out how to move forward,” Jones said. “Whatever we can do legally, that’s what we’ll do. Not that we don’t want to pay them or we’re trying not to pay them, I just want to make sure we’re following the law. … If it wasn’t legal for us to pay more than $25, and we did, then that’s a legal basis (for not paying).”
Turnage told The Dispatch on Friday that he does not recall advising city administration not to pay at least the $25 daily rate per inmate. But he said he understands the city wanting to recuperate what it overpaid.
Turnage said he asked the county to send the demand letter so it would open the possibility of “some kind of compromise,” a claim Hairston confirmed.
Hairston does not agree that the city “overpaid” the county, though.
“They didn’t overpay because we were working under an interlocal agreement,” he said. “… I don’t know how you overpay on a contract when you’ve all agreed to the terms.”
Moreover, Hairston said the $45 daily rate in the interlocal agreement was “benevolent to the city,” as it did not cover the $79 a day it actually costs to house an inmate, especially when Sheriff Eddie Hawkins reports an average of 40 city inmates in the jail at any given time.
Not only that, but the demand of $263,000 doesn’t take into account the 15 inmates the city arrested who have been in the jail for well more than 30 days. Some, which have been bound over to circuit court but are awaiting indictment have sat there for between 100 and 200 days. At least two have been there more than 130 days and still haven’t been processed through municipal court because their cases “keep getting continued.”
“I think you have reasonable enough members on that council who will make a decision of whether they owe the $25 per day,” Hairston said. “… Then let’s try to get some longer term solution.”
That longer term solution, Hairston said, could include negotiating a jail administration fee that is not directly tied to housing inmates. The city and county could also jointly petition the state auditor’s office or circuit court for guidance.
The city not paying anything means it has budgeted and collected tax money for services it ultimately did not fund, and that may force supervisors to raise taxes themselves to cover the difference.
The county can legally decline housing city inmates, per statute, but Hairston called that “the nuclear option” and “an absolute last resort.”
Councilman ‘a bit perplexed’
Ward 6 Councilman Jason Spears, who serves as city budget chair, has already reached out to the auditor’s office himself and is awaiting response.
Both he and Ward 4 Councilwoman Lavonne Harris believe the city should pay what the debts cited in the county’s demand letter, and they both said they take issue with the administration’s unilateral action.
“It’s disheartening because … it undermines the confidence in our ability to make good decisions. I’m a bit perplexed,” Spears said. “… The logic that (the administration) used doesn’t make sense.”
Ward 3 Councilman Rusty Greene agrees the council should have known about the issue sooner, but he wasn’t as quick to say the city should pay the bill.
“I would like the supervisors to show our citizens what they are getting for all the tax dollars we give to them,” Greene told The Dispatch, referring to the roughly $9 million city residents pay in county taxes each year. “Because I really don’t see it.”
E911
For 30 years or so, the city and county split the cost for operating E-911 that a telecommunications surcharge did not cover, County Administrator Jay Fisher said.
For the past two years, total operating costs for E-911 have hovered around $1.2 million. In Fiscal Year 2025, the county and city’s portion was $192,000 each.
The legislature doubled the telecommunications surcharge in the 2025 session, effective this January, and barred counties from entering new interlocal agreements until at least 2027, when the state would have a good idea of how much the new surcharge would cover.
Since Columbus and Lowndes County operated E-911 on a handshake deal, the city hasn’t paid its share for FY 2025, citing the absence of a written agreement.
Hairston said he wants the city to pay that, but he believes it will be a “short-lived problem” regardless, since the new surcharge is expected to cover most, if not all, of E-911 operations costs.
“It’s going to be very close,” Fisher agreed.
But Hairston also noted to The Dispatch that 70% of calls to E-911 come from inside the city. In some counties, he said, those calls are routed to dispatchers in individual city departments to handle, which slows down response.
Zack Plair is the managing editor for The Dispatch.
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