It’s good for Lawrence city commissioners to look into the jail fees the city charges inmates who are sentenced through Municipal Court, but the issue may be more complicated than they expect.

A city ordinance passed in 2013 allows municipal court judges to order defendants to pay “recoupment fees” to cover such things as jail and public defender costs. On one level that makes some sense: The offender is creating costs for the city, so why shouldn’t he or she be required to reimburse the city for those expenses?

One reason this issue has gotten the city’s attention, however, is the discrepancy between how city inmates (those sentenced through Municipal Court) and county inmates (those sentenced through Douglas County District Court) are treated. The county levies taxes to defray the costs of operating the Douglas County Jail, but doesn’t routinely pass the costs of a jail stay on to the inmate. Because the jail is a county operation, the county bills the city for its use of the jail. According to a staff report attached to tonight’s city commission agenda, the county is charging the city $74.02 per day for its inmates. In 2014, that amounted to $702,302.

The 2013 ordinance allows those costs to be passed on to inmates, but it also says the municipal court should consider the defendant’s financial situation and how great a burden the jail fees would place on the defendant or his or her family. It also allows defendants to petition the court to waive the fees, although that probably would require additional legal fees to accomplish.

It’s also interesting that the new ordinance hasn’t been all that successful in actually collecting jail fees. In 2014, $112,998 was collected, about 16 percent of the total costs.

There are a number of ways to look at this issue. It does seem basically unfair that city inmates should pay jail costs while county inmates do not. It’s understandable that the city doesn’t want to increase its budget to cover all the costs, but, at least in 2014, the city was covering 84 percent of the costs anyway, and that doesn’t take into consideration how much the city spent trying to collect that money from inmates.

It’s also worth noting that city residents are paying taxes to the county to support the general operation of the jail for both city and county inmates. That suggests that there may be some middle ground on which city and county officials could work together to come up with a more equitable plan.

The idea of making offenders pay for the costs their cases have created has some validity, but the double standard it has created between city and county inmates is worthy of some further consideration.