A major bill has prompted the county to buy insurance on insurance for inmates in county custody.

The bill was a part of $1 million increase in county public safety expenditures for fiscal year 2017-18. The majority of the increase came from housing inmates elsewhere during required repairs to the Beaufort County Detention Center, located in the basement of the county courthouse. However, $346,000 of the $1 million increase was the cost of a medical bill for an inmate being held in a N.C. Department of Corrections prison.

“We had an inmate that was in our custody — it’s an inmate on a murder charge who had a significant medical event,” said county Manager Brian Alligood. “As I understand it, he was in the custody of DOC, and they have to look after them like we have to look after them. That was a pretty significant event, and we got a pretty significant bill for us.”

Because of HIPAA regulations, Alligood could not reveal the nature of the medical issue.

“It was a medical event. It was not something that was caused by a fight or anything. Nobody else did it to him,” Alligood said.

According to Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Charlie Rose, the bill largely came from a procedure performed on the inmate — the sheriff’s office did not find out about it until after the procedure had taken place.

Alligood said the inmate, a murder suspect, was being held in the DOC system to separate the inmate from others potentially involved in his upcoming trial — a common occurrence to prevent communication between fellow inmates charged in the same crime or those who may have witnessed the crime.

The issue came up during Monday night’s meeting of the Beaufort County Board of Commissioners, as Anita Radcliffe, the county’s Chief Finance Officer, presented the 2017-18 audit to the commissioners. Commissioner Hood Richardson questioned whether the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office was keeping tabs on the health of inmates being held elsewhere.

“When this $346,000 appeared, everybody ran around and said, ‘Well, we don’t know anything about it,’” Richardson said, and asked what was being done to prevent a bill of such magnitude from happening again.

Alligood said the county has taken steps to cut down on medical costs for inmates, including increased screening for medical issues, and treatment for those issues, in addition to adding insurance on top of insurance — if the cost of treatment rises to a certain point, additional insurance will kick in to cover the cost.

“I wish we knew when something was going to happen to somebody, but we don’t know,” Alligood said. “The trend across the state and nation, due to the drug epidemic, the opioid epidemic, we are seeing sicker and sicker people in the jail, and, by law, they are in the care and custody of the jail, and we have to take care of them. We look after them, by law. We’re required to do that. … It’s what separates us from some of the third world countries in the world.”