LIVE OAK, Fla. — Nine months after moving into its permanent location, the state attorney’s office could be on the move again.

After a nearly hour-long discussion about the amount of rent the state attorney’s office is paying the county for the building that opened last April, the Suwannee County Board of County Commissioners agreed to propose three options to state attorney Jeff Siegmeister: he pay the set lease price, the county will move its workers in the office to a smaller building or the state attorney can vacate the building as soon as a commercial building is found.

During Tuesday night’s board meeting, County Administrator Randy Harris informed the board that the state attorney’s office had not been paying the amount the board set last year in order to recoup their cost on the building for the past four months.

Harris said instead the county was receiving around $3,000 less per month than the set rental price of $19,138. Harris said the state attorney’s office has been paying $16,055.

Chairman Ricky Gamble said the amount the state attorney’s office has been paying is based on square footage at a rate deemed comparable to commercial rates.

“It’s just an arbitrary number picked out of thin air,” Gamble said.

Siegmeister, though, said Wednesday on his way back from Tallahassee that the amount he is paying the county is all he’s legally able to collect from the other counties in the Third Judicial Circuit — Columbia, Dixie, Hamilton, Lafayette, Madison and Taylor counties. He said he can’t legally collect the 10 percent escrow amount that Suwannee County requested for future maintenance on the building.

“I can’t bill the other counties for Suwannee County to have money just in case,” he said, adding he didn’t feel the issue was presented fairly. “It’s not that I wouldn’t, it’s that I can’t.”

According to Gamble and county attorney Jimmy Prevatt, Siegmeister never signed the memorandum of understanding that set the amount due to the county.

However, they said the amount that the Suwannee board set had been sent along to those other counties that utilize the state attorney’s office. All of those counties approved that money during their budgeting process.

“Not one of those other counties has called my office and complained about the rate,” Harris said. “Not one. I haven’t gotten an email, a letter, a phone call. Not one of those counties has complained about the rate.”

Prevatt added: “He is unilaterally making a decision that he doesn’t have authority to make.”

Harris told the board that if the state attorney wanted a lower rent, he could oblige by moving the office into another smaller, older building.

Seigmeister said the rent price is not an issue.

“How much the rent is doesn’t matter if the other counties agree to pay it,” he added. “In a perfect world (the other counties) and Suwannee County would come to some agreement to what the space needs are and I would never have to collect or pay rent, it would just be provided and it would be between them.

“Long story short, I would hope that the county would make an arrangement with all the other counties that are obligated to provide me space and I wouldn’t be in the middle of it. That’s kind of the problem. I’m being asked to collect money under other counties’ obligation for things that only benefit Suwannee County.”

Harris proposed that the Suwannee County Sheriff’s Office could move into the new building if the state attorney is moved into another building.

That appealed to resident Bo Hancock.

“He was like a hog in a fresh mud waller when the county decided to build him a nice new building over here,” Hancock said, agreeing with commissioner Ronnie Richardson that the county needed to play hard ball with the state attorney to collect the necessary funds. “If this is the way he’s going to repay the county, I think we need to go back and get him out of his mud waller.

“I think you need to take a ball bat over there and sit down in the office with him and say, ‘This is the way it’s going to be.’ I think we need to play hard ball, period.”

Commissioner Don Hale asked exactly what was the county’s obligation in regards to the state attorney’s office.

Harris and Prevatt said the county only is required to provide space for those within the state attorney’s office that are working on Suwannee County cases.

That would leave the other counties also needing to find space for those handling their cases.

The other option the county agreed to propose was the state attorney find a commercial building to move the entire office into and vacate the building.

Prior to the opening of the new facility, the state attorney’s office had been renting space at the Ameris Bank building on U.S. Highway 129.

The rent there was constantly climbing, which led the county commission to seek its own building to house the state attorney’s office and set a fix payment amount.

“This has been going on for eight months, we just didn’t know it was continuing,” Harris said. “There’s no need to wait another three or four weeks and put us another month behind in payments, in my mind.

“I don’t see that anything has changed except that we weren’t collecting what all these other counties believed that they were paying us.”

Siegmeister, though, said the county should not be behind in its payments for the building.

“The amount of money being paid more than covers the mortgage and cost of the building from what I was given as far as the overhead, the loan and the mortgage on the building,” he said adding that his staff will ask to be placed on the agenda for the Feb. 5 meeting in order to answer questions.

“It’s not what Suwannee County wants, but it’s not that the mortgage isn’t being paid with the money that is being released to them.”