CROWN POINT | The smiles were strained and the handshake forced, but Sheriff Rogelio "Roy" Dominguez and Lake County Criminal Court Judge Thomas Stefaniak Jr. did both Wednesday in an apparent truce of their turf war.

The three-month-long bureaucratic struggle between the sheriff's work-release program and its rival Lake County Community Corrections program, which Stefaniak represents, was for precious bed space within an aging former county hospital.

The sheriff will retain a wing of the hospital, where he has been housing more than 40 inmates. He had lost that wing at one point.

The corrections program won a suite of offices the sheriff's staff now occupies, a separate abandoned building called the Kimbrough Center and an unused upper floor of the hospital in such poor shape it is called the "war zone."

Mark Murphy, director of operations for Community Corrections, said the state prison program will finance the war zone's renovation at a cost yet to be determined.

The sheriff, apparently grudgingly, said, "I will accept this. Let's move on."

County Attorney John Dull, who had worked to mediate a compromise, shook hands with the sheriff and then gently directed the sheriff across the commissioners' meeting room to Stefaniak, who extended a hand to sheriff before Dull forced the issue.

The sheriff said afterward, "I haven't changed my opposition to the Community Corrections' transition program. I still think its designed to help the Indiana Department of Corrections to the detriment of county taxpayers."

Both programs compete to provide minimum security for convicts, with the sheriff's program alleviating overcrowding in the County Jail and the corrections program lessens overcrowding in state prisons.

Both house inmates within the old Parramore Hospital near 93rd and Taft Street in Crown Point.

Corrections asked the county commissioners in March for permission to expand its program by taking over some of the sheriff's beds.

Commissioners sided with the corrections program when no compromise could be reached between the sheriff and corrections. The sheriff retaliated by temporarily cutting off food service he previously provided corrections inmates and stopped cutting the front lawn on the corrections side of the building.

Commissioners offered to move corrections to a different building last week, but corrections rejected that proposal and came up with Wednesday's counteroffer.