A funding shortfall in the Kalamazoo County Office of Community Corrections could force staff layoffs as early as July and eliminate services that currently keep dozens of people out of jail and the county board did not approve new funding at its June 2 meeting, deferring the question to the next budget cycle.
Community Corrections Director Ken Bobo presented the situation to the board in detailed terms: the department is currently obligated to pay $234,000 in indirect costs, county overhead charges allocated to each department, with that figure projected to rise to $306,000. Bobo said indirect costs, not program spending, are the core problem relaying what his own accountant had told him: “You’re on every line item except indirect costs. They’re the problem.”
The department asked the board to either waive the indirect cost charges or approve a $195,000 mid-year budget adjustment. The board did not act on either request.
What’s at Stake
Bobo laid out what he described as the cascading consequences of the budget shortfall, presenting the board with a series of scenarios tied to specific positions and programs.
If the department has to lay off a pretrial services officer, Bobo said, that position currently supervises approximately 80 defendants released from jail under court order. Without that supervision, he argued, those defendants would return to jail. At the county’s estimated jail bed cost of $150 per day, Bobo calculated that housing 80 people for a year would amount to approximately $4.4 million — far more than the department’s entire budget request.
Losing the drug testing position, Bobo told the board, would effectively decertify all specialty courts in Kalamazoo County, including drug treatment courts, because those courts require compliant drug testing standards to maintain state and federal certification. He said loss of certification would eliminate approximately $350,000 in annual grant revenue and shutter every drug treatment court in the county.
A third pressure point Bobo identified is the indigent electronic monitoring fund, which he said covers the $300-per-month monitoring cost for defendants who cannot afford it themselves. He said approximately 60% of the roughly 60 people on electronic monitoring daily are indigent, and that the fund — currently pieced together from remaining ARPA dollars, Kalamazoo Community Foundation grants, and law enforcement funds — is projected to run out in August. After that point, he said, defendants ordered released but unable to afford monitoring would remain in jail.
“People ordered out on bond in November, Thanksgiving, December, Christmas, they’d stay in jail because they can’t afford to pay for it and we wouldn’t have the funding to,” Bobo said.
The Budget Process Dispute
The board’s discussion surfaced a dispute about process as much as dollars. The county administrator told the board that no new funding request was submitted by the OCC for the 2026 budget cycle, and that approving a mid-year adjustment would disrupt the established budget process and “arbitrarily commit the board to this funding for the 2027 budget in advance of any requests ever being reviewed by the board.”
Commissioner Wheeler said she did not want to see people who are indigent suffer because of budgeting problems, but acknowledged the difficulty of finding mid-year funds. Vice Chair Taylor made a motion to direct the administrator to identify $20,000 from strategic reserves for electronic monitoring, an amount Bobo said would extend the fund through September and October but would not address the staffing shortfall. That motion was later rescinded after the administrator proposed an alternative path.
As an alternative, the administrator identified approximately $40,500 in refunded ARPA funds, after a $25,000 allocation to the Planning Department, that could be directed to the indigent tethering program without disrupting the budget process. He recommended the board wait until after the annual audit, at which point the board’s “golden ratio” policy would allow them to allocate funds from the board priorities bucket toward both the electronic monitoring program and the staffing shortfall, with the OCC submitting a formal new funding request for the 2027 budget.
A Problem Years in the Making
Bobo told the board the department has been in conversations with county administration about the indirect cost issue since 2014. “It’s always been: use up your fund balance and then come and see us,” he said. State funding for the program more than doubled from roughly $750,000 in 2018–2019 to approximately $1.56 million, but state officials have indicated no increase is expected in the current year and any leftover state funds will be used to bring additional counties into the program rather than increase existing allocations.
The board directed the administrator to bring a resolution for ARPA fund allocation to the next meeting, with a formal OCC budget request to be submitted for the 2027 cycle.
