CONNEAUT — A team effort — including consultations with judges and the Ashtabula County Sheriff’s Department — may be needed to address the state’s concern with aspects of operations within Conneaut’s municipal jail.

City Council’s public safety committee were briefed on the jail situation Wednesday night by Police Chief Jon Arcaro and Detective Sgt. Charles Burlingham, who also serves as jail administrator.

No decisions were made at the informal freewheeling 90-minute meeting, but officials in attendance agreed a group effort may be needed in different areas to help placate the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.

The state claims the local lockup routinely houses more prisoners than the five at one time its certificate of operation allows. Also, many inmates stay longer than the maximum 12 days stipulated in the same document.

If changes aren’t made, the state has threatened to consider the jail a full-serve facility and inspect it accordingly, officials said. In that case, the jail certainly will fall short because it does not offer services expected of a full-service facility, such as a wider range of medical and recreational services.

Citations on future inspections won’t necessarily shut down the jail but could make the city more vulnerable to lawsuits filed by inmates, Arcaro has said.

The state has outlined a handful of options to the city, all of which require lots of money, council learned.

“There is no easy solution,” Arcaro told the committee.

Acquiring full-service status quickly was dismissed because of the extra staffing required. Another choice is to reduce the jail to a six-hour holding facility, which could mean full-time corrections officers would be dropped to part-time hours. The city would save some money in wages, but the savings would be gobbled up by the cost to house prisoners at other jails and transporting them to those locations.

Inmates at the city jail are charged $70 a day, but collections on that fee — the responsibility of a company hired by the police department — yield little return. Only $6,000 has been earned through the program over the past five years, members learned.

Burlingham provided committee members some jail statistics for the period June 25, 2007, through Wednesday. During that 365-day period, the jail has had five or fewer inmates only 81 days. On one day, 12 inmates were incarcerated at the same time.

The 12-day stay limit was exceeded 47 times during that stretch, Burlingham said.

Thomas Harris, Conneaut Municipal Court judge, will be consulted to see if sentences can be structured to minimize the impact on the jail. However, Harris and other judges often have no say on the sentences they hand down, said assistant law director Luke Gallagher.

“Some are mandatory sentences,” he said. “The judge has no discretion on those matters.”

The city has tried other methods to ease the burden on the jail, such as house arrest and breaking up lengthy jail stays into 12-day increments, Gallagher said.