Vigo County officials outline juvenile center transition, seek funds for medical care and training

Vigo County officials told the budget committee that control of the county juvenile center will formally move back under the courts at the start of the calendar year and that the county needs to reconfigure how it pays for on-site medical care and mandatory staff training. Those changes, officials said, will increase the juvenile center's 2026 budget request.

Court and county leaders described the switch as an administrative change tied to who is ultimately liable for conditions in the juvenile facility.

Officials said juvenile medical services previously were paid from the sheriff's budget but need to move into the juvenile center's budget when control transfers. The same vendor that provides jail medical care would be used, staff said, and the annual medical contract was cited at roughly $220,000 in current-year charges. The committee was told county attorneys will review whether the charge is an additional cost or a reallocation of an existing contract line.

The county also seeks a recurring line for training. Staff described Department of Corrections standards that require a 120-hour basic training for new detention officers and 40 hours of annual in-service training for incumbent staff, some of which must be in person (de-escalation, cell extraction, CPR/first aid). Officials said training currently creates overtime and backfill needs because the facility must maintain minimum staffing on each shift while officers attend required courses. Juvenile administration requested roughly $20,000 to $30,000 to cover training-related overtime and backfill in 2026 and indicated that training costs historically were not fully budgeted in payroll.

Committee members and juvenile staff discussed the juvenile center's bed capacity and the county's nonreverting fund that had subsidized some juvenile costs. Officials said the facility has a 19-bed capacity; on the meeting day there were 14 residents, five of whom were out-of-county placements. County staff said the number of out-of-county placements had fallen since the court began taking more local cases back, and warned that the nonreverting fund that had been built by per-diem payments from out-of-county placements is shrinking and cannot be relied on long term to sustain staff or medical lines.

Officials said they will ask the council to appropriate the juvenile medical contract into the juvenile center budget for 2026 and to consider a one-time or ongoing supplemental allocation to cover the first-year increase and the training line. That reallocation would require coordination with the sheriff's office and, potentially, counsel to determine whether payments are new costs or budgeted transfers.

The committee paused further action pending follow-up numbers on the medical contract, the remaining nonreverting fund balance and final staffing projections for 2026.