If it ain’t the weather, it’s the proposed new Mower County Jail and Justice Center.

Everybody is talking about it, particularly how taxpayers will pay for the estimated $36 million project.

Already, Mower County is selling $10 million in lease-revenue bonds to fund the justice center portion of the project.

The remaining sale of bonds awaits the county board’s decision to award a contract for the construction of the facilities.

Bids are due March 4 on the proposed two-story, 124-bed project in downtown Austin.

The Mower County Commissioners have repeatedly said they “hope” contractors are “hungry for work” — most recently at last week’s update meeting with architects and construction managers — in the weak economy and their bids will be lower, thereby reducing the anticipated costs of the new jail.

Austin is the largest population center in Mower County; ergo, more taxes come from the city’s residents.

When Mayor Tom Stiehm gave his recent State of the City address, several Austinites asked questions about the jail and justice center project and shared their opinions. Not all of them were favorable to the project or its expected price tag.

Despite the fact the jail is a “county project,” as the mayor explained, about nine questions or comments were addressed to the mayor about the project: “How much will it cost? What is the city’s share of the costs? Is the city spending more on the acquisition of two blocks of downtown property than budgeted?

Why did the jail and justice center costs get so high so fast? Why does Freeborn County have a new jail that is only half full of prisoners? Are we building it to house illegal immigrants? How much will it cost us to operate and maintain the jail after it is built? What about the Department of Corrections? I think they’re to blame for us having to build a new jail. That’s who threw this whole mess at us with their rules.”

And, “State mandates are unfunded. They’re killing us. The DOC turned the Mower County Jail, which was originally built to house 72 prisoners, into the one we got today that can only house 35 prisoners.”

The latter observation came from the mayor himself, a retired long-time Austin police detective, who arguably was responsible for putting offenders behind bars over the last three decades.

Amazi: ‘not a Holiday Inn’

Terese Amazi, a former Mower County patrol deputy and jail detention officer, is today the sheriff responsible for housing prisoners sent to jail by courts.

She has never wavered from her support of building a new Mower County Jail and with good reason: The Minnesota DOC has reduced the original 72-bed jail in downtown Austin to a 90-day lockup, forcing the county to house prisoners elsewhere.

In addition, the state’s short-term offenders program sends criminals back to their county of residence to serve the remainder of their prison sentences.

“Presently, we have between 25 and 30 prisoners boarded out to jails in other counties,” Amazi said.

The costs of doing that are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ask Amazi the questions skeptics raise about the proposed Mower County Jail and Justice Center project and get simple, direct answers.

Amazi has heard the doubts before.

Do you still support building a 124 bed jail? “Yes,” said Amazi.

Is building a 124-bed jail over-building? “No,” she said.

Is a jail a crime deterrent? “No,” the sheriff responded.

Do prisoners in the Mower County Jail receive better food, free health care and other amenities they could/would not provide themselves outside incarceration? Is a county jail like spending time in a Holiday Inn?

That two-part question brought Amazi’s longest response.

“Spending time in a place made of concrete and steel is not like staying at a Holiday Inn,” she observed.

So, it can be said, the Mower County sheriff is obviously impatient to see a new detention facility constructed, so prisoners sentenced to jail time can be incarcerated in Mower County.

Freeborn County

The comparison between Mower County’s jail needs and those of neighboring Freeborn County are impossible to ignore.

Go back to October 1999, when the Freeborn County Board of Commissioners approved a regional jail study.

According to published reports at the time, Steele County officials first pushed for the study and a regional jail that would house long-term offenders and overflow from other county jails.

The study came and went, but a regional jail didn’t happen.

Steele County went ahead and built its own new jail and then Freeborn County.

When the new Steele County jail opened at Owatonna, officials there pointed out the 160-bed facility was being built to house other counties’ overflow prisoners as well as their own.

Freeborn County itself built a new jail in downtown Albert Lea five years ago.

Almost immediately, it was housing other counties’ overflow of prisoners — including Mower County, already mired in the DOC’s seemingly constant reductions in prisoner capacity.

Freeborn County Sheriff Mark Harig was a part of that county’s solution to public safety and jail overcrowding problems.

“Freeborn County originally built a jail to house 175 prisoners,” Harig said. “As soon as we were ready to open, the DOC inspected our new jail and declared the operational capacity — the maximum number of beds we were licensed for — was 136.

“At that same time we had a backlog of about 100 people who had been sentenced to jail time that we had to take care of first,” Harig said.

After handling the backlog of prisoners, the Freeborn County Jail now houses 52 to 65 prisoners or 50 to 65 percent of its new DOC-licensed capacity of 122 beds.

Even though Austin and Albert Lea — the largest population centers of each county — are only about 23 miles apart, when Mower County’s new jail opens in August 2010, that will mean the two counties will have the ability by themselves to house more than 240 prisoners, and always depending upon the whims of the DOC.

Current plans for the Mower County Jail call for it to have the flexibility to be expanded to house 248 prisoners if (when?) needed.

“I don’t think they’re over-building,” Harig said of Mower County’s plans. “The old Freeborn County Jail was built new in 1976 and to house, I believe, 40 or 42 prisoners.

“Just 20 years later, we had outgrown that jail. After only 20 years, it was deteriorating and falling apart and we had to start studying how we would solve those problems. Then, we opened the new jail in 2004 and now we hope that it will take care of our needs.”

Harig said, “As much as I hate to admit it, we need to build county jails that can be expanded.”

Harig agreed with the Mower County sheriff: A jail is not, by itself, a deterrent to crime.

And the Freeborn County sheriff knows the pitfalls of fighting crime today — with or without adequate detention facilities for offenders. One of them is the state’s lawmakers.

“One of the things we are experiencing now, is that it appears courts everywhere are sentencing more people to probation, than to jail,” he said. “There’s more leniency in their sentences it seems.”

There is also the problem of tinkering with sentencing guidelines.

Harig pointed to Freeborn County’s unique ZAP (Zero Adult Provider) program, focusing on those adults who provide alcohol to under-age youths.

When ZAP was instituted, Freeborn County officers raided beer busts and keggers, cited minors for under-age drinking and automatically cited the adults furnishing the booze.

The public liked the aggressive effort, according to Harig.

The Freeborn County district court judges joined the crusade against under-age drinking, according to Harig.

“The adults knew they were going to get to spend 30 days in jail and ZAP was a terrific deterrent at the time,” he said.

Then, a law change occurred and the state ruled the 30-day mandatory jail sentence was invalid.

The adult offenders escaped jail time.

Still, Harig said today’s county jails need to be built as much to meet public safety concerns as well as to anticipate the DOC’s constantly changing guidelines and the whims of judges tomorrow.

However, building a jail that is ready-made for expansion comes with risk — risks that lawmakers will unmake laws or make new ones. Risks that judges will prefer probation and home detention over jail time, too.

It’s what county sheriffs like Amazi and Harig face in their jobs.

Harig said he concurs with the Freeborn County commissioners’ decision to build a new jail that could be expanded and for one simple reason.

“It’s adequate for our needs,” he said.