Five times a day, Mesa police detention officers drive to downtown Phoenix to book suspects while Maricopa County's former satellite jail sits shuttered and empty just a few miles from the Mesa police station.

Glendale police take defendants downtown 24 times a week, or 1,248 times a year, while another county jail facility sits idle in nearby Surprise.

In Tempe, city detention officers typically spend two hours on each jail run to Phoenix, including transportation time and time spent waiting for suspects to be booked. They make several runs a day.

It's a constant shuttle with a hefty price tag, as vans full of misdemeanor suspects from communities as far flung as Gilbert and Wickenburg make the trek to Maricopa County's Fourth Avenue jail.

During the 2010-11 fiscal year, the Valley's eight largest suburbs paid more than $16 million to Maricopa County for the cost of booking and housing misdemeanor suspects.

This year, the costs are expected to climb to $20 million because of a recently announced 25 percent rate increase imposed by the county.

Four years ago, Sheriff Joe Arpaio closed the county's satellite jails as a cost-cutting measure. The move shifted costs from the county to the cities and took police resources away from other vital tasks, the Valley police chiefs say.

Now, the new increase has prompted Valley chiefs, some individually and some collectively, to look for new options, some of which could cut the Sheriff's Office out of the equation altogether.

A new model?

"We have to find a different business model. This one, we can't control," Mesa Police Chief Frank Milstead said.

To reduce daily prisoner costs, Surprise Police Chief Mike Frazier said his agency is having officers cite suspects when possible rather than arresting them, as long as they do not pose a public-safety threat.

"Just looking at dollars and cents, it's a heck of a lot less expensive to just cite them because the minute you put them in jail you've just spent right off the bat well over $300," he said.

In the East Valley, meanwhile, several plans are ciruculating among police chiefs that include:

Dusting off an old Mesa plan to solicit bids to build and run a private jail.

Renting the closed Mesa jail from the county, renovating it and re-opening it as a regional East Valley booking and detention facility.

Pooling existing jail resources in several East Valley cities to cut the number of defendants transported to Phoenix..

The original request for proposals for a private jail, obtained by The Arizona Republic through a public-records request, listed Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert and Scottsdale as participating partners.

"I think it's very doable," Milstead said. "It has a lot of potential."

The initial plan never got off the ground, partly for political reasons after an inmate escaped from a privately run state prison near Kingman and was charged with killing a couple in New Mexico.

"We did not think it was a good time" to pursue a privately-run booking facility, even if it housed lower-risk suspects, Milstead said.

Evaluating costs

A county consultant is re-evaluating staffing and use of all county facilities, including the closed satellite jails in Mesa, Avondale and Surprise, said Mike Olson, the Sheriff's Office's director of detention services.

Olson said it is possible that the closed jails could be reopened, but they would have to be renovated and staffed. Those satellite jails are only holding facilities, and defendants would still need to be taken downtown eventually, a cost the Sheriff's Office would have to reassume.

"The biggest hurdle would be the staff to put out there,'' Olson said, adding that about 15 detention officers would be needed to open the Mesa jail alone. There also are other costs and liability issues , such as providing medical care for defendants, some 60 to 70 percent of whom are under the influence of alcohol or drugs when they are booked.

Among the issues the consultant is expected to address is whether reopening the booking areas of satellite jails would increase the efficiency of Sheriff's Office operations, said Lee Ann Bohn, the county's deputy budget director.

Although the county is not required to pay the cost of transporting suspects arrested by city police to the downtown jail, it might improve the justice system's efficiency, she said.

The satellite jails began opening in the 1980s during a push to decentralize county government and provide services to the Valley's sprawling population.

Voters approved a $260 million bond issue in 1986 that built the county's Southeast Regional Complex, which includes a courthouse, a Clerk of Courts Office, a Recorder's Office, a satellite jail, a juvenile jail and a sheriff's substation.

The Mesa jail also has two pods that were once capable of housing up to 120 inmates.

Facilities in Avondale and Surprise were built later.

Arpaio closed all of the facilities and reassigned the staff downtown in November 2007 after concluding they were a drain on his budget. At the time, he argued that the move made sense in light of the 2002 voter approval of a jail tax that called for centralization of the Maricopa County Superior Court and financed the Fourth Avenue Jail.

While the move may have helped Arpaio's budget, Valley chiefs say it's been a strain on theirs.

Tempe's Ryff said that beyond jail-fee increases, his city still must pick up the secondary costs, such as gas for transporting defendants, the salaries of detention officers and the time consumed by the booking process.

"There's not much more I can give up from my operating budget without seriously affecting public safety,'' he said.