County to talk jail funding

Published 4:24 pm Saturday, October 4, 2008

Size matters.

Both in the price tag for new Mower County jail and justice center facilities and the size of the jail portion of the project.

More details are emerging about both price tag and jail size issues.

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Taxpayers will learn Tuesday how the Mower County commissioners plan to pay for the proposed new jail and justice center.

The county commissioners meet that afternoon in regular session.

On their agenda is a proposed resolution requiring the Mower County Housing and Redevelopment Authority to participate in a lease revenue bond for the justice center.

The county commissioners have proposed to build a two-story, jail and justice center complex on two blocks of downtown property made available by the city of Austin through a private property acquisition process.

The complex will include a 128-bed county jail with the capacity to add 100 more beds when necessary.

When constructed, the jail and justice center will rival Austin High School in size.

The proposed price tag for the jail/justice center is $36 million.

The county commissioners hope to use undesignated reserves to whittle the cost down and bond for the rest.

Earlier this summer, the commissioners set a ceiling of $27 million for bonding for the project.

Jail overcrowding and court security issues forced the county officials to come to the conclusion to build new facilities.

Minnesota statutes govern how a county can issue bonds for capital improvements. The statutes require the county to hold a public meeting before the issuance of the bonds.

Special provisions cover issuing bonds for the construction of criminal justice facilities, such as a jail.

The size and the cost of the jail and justice center facilities have been issues from the start.

Mower County continues to board out prisoners to jails in Mitchell County, Iowa and Freeborn and Steele counties in Minnesota.

Both the Freeborn and Steele counties’ jails are newer and opened within the last five years.

When Mower County first began examining building a new jail only — district court and court-related services were added to the project later — the figure most frequently mentioned was a 90-bed jail.

Presently, Mower County’s existing jail has been reduced by the Minnesota Department of Corrections to a 90-day lockup, forcing those prisoners with longer sentences to be transported to other counties’ jails.

While taxpayers may grumble the proposed $36 million price tag is too high, the top law enforcement officers say the proposed 128-bed size is not “too big.”

Austin is the population center of Mower County and the city accounts for more crime and more prisoners than elsewhere in the county.

“My concern is there are times when Austin police officers arrest individuals who need to be placed in jail and there is no room in this jail facility to put people,” said Austin Chief of Police Paul Philipp. “Then, we have a problem.”

Most frequently at 1 or 2 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday those problems occur, according to the police chief, as to whether or not the individual is going to be placed in jail or “are they going to get released, because there is no place to put them?” Philipp said.

“When the jail is filled to capacity and it’s 1 or 2 a.m. in the morning and you have a prisoner in custody, it doesn’t help us to say, ‘Now, we have to run them down to Iowa or up to Owatonna.’ That’s problematic for us,” Philipp said.

“Having a facility that is adequate to house the people who need to be housed is an important issue for us,” he concluded.

“If the Austin Police Department had to transport offenders to another jail facility elsewhere is not a “workable situation,” Philipp said. “It creates a significant burden for us. It’s a staffing issue.”

The Austin Police Department currently has 31 officers, including the police chief.

The department has had as many as 36 officers in the late 1970s and as low as 28 in the late-1990s.

Philipp said he was not sure he was qualified to answer whether or not the proposed new Mower County 128-bed jail is the right size or too big.

“I don’t think it is in our best interests to build a jail that is full, when you open the doors,” he said.

Mower County Sheriff Terese Amazi agreed it would be wrong to build a new jail that would be filled immediately.

The sheriff has never wavered from favoring building a jail that is, firstly, big enough, according to prisoner projections, and one that has the flexibility to be expanded.

That was recommended by the National Institute of Corrections, retained years ago by the Mower County commissioners to conduct the jail study that became the basis for the decision to build a 128-bed jail.

Under-building a new jail could be disastrous for local law enforcement. “Definitely, we don’t want to do that,” Amazi said.

According to the sheriff, currently, the average daily population in the Mower County Jail is 75 prisoners.

That includes prisoners who are released on electronic home monitoring, boarded out and held in the Austin facility.

Also Tuesday, the county commissioners will hear an update on the city’s acquisition efforts of the private properties in the two-block area where the new jail and justice center will be built (Fourth to Second Avenue, First to Second Streets northeast) and its own attempts to acquire the Robbins block property.

Tuesday’s meeting begins at 1 p.m. in the commissioners’ meeting room in the lower level of the Mower County government center in downtown Austin.