Representatives from the state Legislative Auditor’s Office are in St. Tammany Parish this week, looking into how the St. Tammany Parish Jail is being funding.

Joy Irwin, advisory services director for the state Legislative Auditor’s Office, confirmed that people from Legislative Auditor Steve Theriot’s Office were meeting with Sheriff Jack Strain this past week to discuss how the parish jail is being funded and what better ways to fund it in the future.

George Bonnett, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office, said Sheriff Jack Strain was meeting with them all day Wednesday and did not know how long they would be in the area. Irwin said this is not an audit but merely an advisory review.

This review comes after a long-standing dispute between Parish President Kevin Davis and Strain over who’s responsible for funding the jail hit is boiling point last year.

The dispute heated up last fall when Strain requested the parish government pay $2 million a year to help defray the cost of operating the 1,200-bed facility.

Strain said while his deputies man the facility, it is a parish facility and the therefore the parish is obligated to fund its operational costs.

He said without the money he could not afford to keep the jail open at its current capacity and would have to start releasing prisoners and laying off deputies, something he has already had to do on a small scale.

Davis said the parish has done its part by turning over the proceeds from a quarter-cent sales tax dedicated to jail maintenance and operations.

The two men exchanged several letters back and forth, with Strain requesting money and Davis denying those request.

In a letter Davis sent to Strain, the parish president states, “when the jail sales taxes was implemented it was intended to fund the parish’s obligations for the jail solely with the tax.”

“When the parish government agreed to present the jail sales tax to voters in 1998 it was intended that the tax would completely fulfill all parish obligations for jail funding and prisoner care once the remittance reached a sustainable level,” he wrote.

In his letter to Davis, Strain said that tax never covered the expenses of the jail. The disagreement between the two men hit an all-time high when Davis sent a letter to Theriot’s office requesting that the office looking into what Strain is using that money for.

He questioned transfers Strain made from the jail budget to his capital projects budget, and suggested that he may have used the money raised through the dedicated jail tax to construct his new sheriff’s complex on the east side of the parish.

Strain denied that accusation and sent his own letter Theriot, requesting his office looking into how Davis is spending money from the parish’s dedicated streets fund.