Hood: True cost of jail near the Courthouse would be nearly half what it would be on a remote site | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    Back in February, at the annual Board of Commissioners' retreat, the architectural firm hired by the county to do a study on building a new jail was making its presentation of the options it had identified. Two of those options included building a new jail on a remote site (other than at the Courthouse), one of which proposed including a new Sheriff's office for $23 million and another with just the jail and no "Law Enforcement Center" for an estimated $17.5 million. Before the architects finished their presentation and before the scheduled local government finance experts were to report on how such a project could be paid for, Chairman Jerry Langley made a motion to build the new jail at the Industrial Park. The motion passed 4-3 with Republican Commissioner Al Klemm voting with the three Democrats.

    At the April 1 meeting (and this is no April Fool's joke) the board learned that the vote violated its Rules of Procedure. However, it did nothing to correct the illegal vote.

    At a recent Washington City Council meeting the council was told by its planning staff and attorney that a jail could not legally be placed in the Industrial Park because it would violate the zoning regulations and be a violation of the restrictive covenants on the land. The council was clear in expressing its concern that the city had not been involved in the decision to put the jail in the Industrial Park, even though the city has/had an ownership interest in the park. Still the Commissioners took no action.

    At the same meeting, Commissioner Hood Richardson made a presentation that essentially showed, using the same numbers used by the architects, that a jail could be built behind the Courthouse for less money, both in initial construction costs and in annual operating costs. Still the board took no action to rescind its previous action. Here's a summary of what Commissioner Richardson presented.

    He used the same square footage cost projections the architects used and the same basic floor plan with the exception of removing a "day room, a weekend room, a parking garage and re-configured the placement of the "pods" on the site" and came out with a projected cost of $17 million. He then computed the savings from not having to transport prisoners and that resulted in a decrease in operating costs of $360,000. He then showed that this $360,000 would finance $7.2 million at 5% interest or $9 million at 4%, thus off-setting the $17 million projected cost by from seven to nine million dollars, bringing the net effective cost of building behind the Court house to eight to ten million, or roughly half as much as the proposed Industrial Park proposal.

    Richardson went on to show that Beaufort could contract out the housing of 20 prisoners to neighboring counties for $558,000 per year, or half as much as the debt service would be on a $17.5 million facility. He suggested that a study might show that reducing the maximum load on the jail by 20+/- inmates might well eliminate the "safety" concerns that have been used to justify building a new jail. It has been reported that several neighboring counties have available jail space to house Beaufort's overflow.

    In a brief interview after the meeting Mr. Richardson told the Observer: "This jail issue needs more and better study. There are several alternatives that the Jail Committee has refused to even consider. And the numbers clearly show we can build a jail behind the courthouse that would accommodate more inmates than we have been having in jail, have room to expand in the future and operate at a lower cost than a remote site. The facts show that we could save the taxpayers more than ten million dollars by building behind the Courthouse. The decision to build in the Industrial Park was not only illegal but very premature and would cost the taxpayers much more money. We really need to do a better job of planning when we're spending this kind of money."

    You can watch Hood's presentation in the video below: