Going to jail might cost you more

McLeod County now has the authority to raise its jail booking fee, but Sheriff Scott Rehmann said Tuesday he’s not sure it will.

A state law passed this year aims at easing state mandates on city and county governments. One of these mandates is a $10 cap on the fee sheriff’s departments charge for booking inmates at a county or regional jail.

The new law allows sheriff’s departments to charge enough of a fee to “cover costs incurred by the county in the booking of that person.”

Rehmann said the actual cost to book inmates into the McLeod County Jail is about $20, mostly for the staff time involved. The current booking fee is $10 and the County Board would have to approve any proposed increase.

“We are going to look at what other counties are doing right now and try to keep it similar,” Rehmann said.

One of Rehmann’s concerns is keeping the booking fee low enough that it’s affordable. If it isn’t, the county will have a harder time trying to collect the fee.

“The $10 — sometimes you have difficulty collecting just that,” he said. “It’s not like we say, ‘You can’t come in our jail if you can’t pay our booking fee.’”

(Jorge Sosa is a staff writer for the Hutchinson Leader. He can be reached at sosa@hutchinsonleader.com)