Located in the Public Safety building, Unalaska's jail usually houses two or three prisoners a night. (Annie Ropeik/KUCB)

The state has added back most of the funding it planned to cut for community jails like the one in Unalaska.

The governor’s amended budget, released Wednesday, restores $7 million out of the $10.4 million jails fund, which pays for local lock-ups in more than a dozen Alaska towns.

That would still mean a big cut for what police say is a vital program. At a legislative hearing this week, Corrections Commissioner Ronald Taylor said he plans to work with the state Department of Public Safety, which covers things like prisoner transportation, on ways to help offset the remaining shortfall.

"The impact that we are learning and have learned from the various communities is pretty significant," Taylor said. "We’re now understanding that this is covering more than just community jails, that this is paying for community safety in a lot of these smaller communities," meaning things like police and dispatchers, too.

Unalaska’s jail funding doesn’t cover any other police needs -- but it does pay for almost 90 percent of the facility’s $900,000 budget. And police chief Jamie Sunderland says closing the facility isn’t an option.

"If we’re going to have enforcement of laws here, that kind of goes hand-in-hand with needing a jail," he says. "What do you do? So if you’re going to enforce and say, 'It’s not right to stab someone, and you’re going to get arrested for that,' there’s got to be some place to go."

The 12-bed facility houses a few hundred people a year, usually for just a few days at a time and no longer than a month.

"And what that means is due to our services and what we have available for inmates in our facility, we can only keep them for a maximum of 30 days," Sunderland says. "Due to some travel delays and things like that, it could be a little bit longer, but by then we’re certainly trying to get them out."

Sunderland says about 10 percent of their prisoners get sent onto Anchorage to await trial on more serious charges, or serve time in state facilities. Arranging that travel can sometimes take weeks -- leaving the local jail to act as a holding cell.

Sunderland says Unalaska’s public safety department will look to the city to fill in any gap left by state budget cuts.