princeton – Mercer County’s share of money from a court settlement against the company making the medication Lipitor is being used to help keep the county’s regional jail bill paid until its new budget is prepared.
The daily cost of keeping an inmate in West Virginia’s regional jail system recently grew from $45.97 to $57.46, an increase of almost $12. To meet the extra cost, the Mercer County Commission met Thursday in special session to see how to pay the county’s April jail bill in full.
In March, the county’s jail bill was $127,474.81. By April, it had grown to $146,985.60, according to county records.
“We had already fixed our budget for the previous year based on the previous rate,” County Commission President Bill Archer said. “We’ve already worked on our budget for the coming year, but that increase was not included in it immediately, so now we have to make some adjustments in order to get through this one month and the coming months will be in better shape in terms of that.”
On April 30, West Virginia Attorney General J.B. McCuskey announced that cities and counties were sharing nearly $3.5 million from a settlement agreement with Pfizer, Inc., Ranbaxy, Inc. and related companies concerning the cholesterol drug Lipitor. The lawsuit alleged the two companies conspired to delay the introduction of a cheaper generic Lipitor for 20 months.
Mercer County received $50,000 from this settlement. Archer said that unlike money from settlements against opioid manufacturers, the counties are not limited by how they can spend it. Archer proposed using that money to help pay the jail bill.
“We can use those to plug a hole immediately, and that’s what we decided to do,” Archer said.
Commissioners Brian Blankenship and Greg Puckett voted with Archer to use $43,000 of the Lipitor funds to help pay off the April jail bill.
Paying the monthly jail bill will be addressed in the new county budget which starts July 1, he said. This new budget will be adjusted with the new daily inmate rate in mind.
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