The county will move forward with a $36 million jail expansion.
During a joint meeting between the county council and the commissioners Tuesday — a continuation of a discussion started last week — the council agreed to move forward with something of a compromise, a $36 million project that includes the $34 million base bid as well as two alternates, a jail pod shell (that can be outfitted later) as well as a larger intake and booking area.
The county commissioners opened bids on the jail project, which also includes a new, adjacent building for community corrections, two weeks ago. In an effort to secure the lowest and best price, architects with RQAW working in conjunction with Garmong Construction in Terre Haute, the project manager, divided the project into a base bid — which includes a new pod with 104 additional beds, a new intake area as well as a medical suite, among other, smaller improvements — as well as a handful of alternates.
The base bid, however, came in at $34 million, over the $32.5 million estimate.
But when the county council met last week to approve financing, councilman Bob Lechner said he wasn’t convinced the county was doing enough, even expressing support for moving forward with the entire project — base bid plus all the alternates — for an estimated total of $41 million.
The council ended up tabling financing yet again, directing both bond counsel with Barnes and Thornburg in Indianapolis as well as Oscar Gutierrez, founder and principal of Bondry Management Consultants in Carmel, to see if the county could even afford it.
Gutierrez appeared before the council during the joint meeting on Tuesday, as the group met at City Hall, 201 Vigo St., to say that spending the full $41 million would require a bond sale as well as nearly all of the county’s $7 million share of American Rescue Plan Act funds in addition to the committal of both a portion of the county’s property tax revenue and some of a new public safety Local Income Tax, which the council worked in conjunction with the City of Vincennes only recently to implement as additional funds are necessary for future EMS service.
Moving forward with a $41 million project, Gutierrez told the council, would be “beyond the financial capabilities of the county,” so he encouraged them to approve only the $36 million project, which will secure the base package as well as the two largest of the alternates.
“My recommendation is to stay under that $36 million,” Gutierrez told the council.
Commission president Kellie Streeter, in kicking off discussions between both the council and the commissioners, said she was in favor of doing the slightly larger $36 million project.
“We don’t want to build half a project,” she said, adding that the county set out to determine “what we want and what we can afford.”
“We know the answer to that now,” she said.
Commissioner Trent Hinkle, too, said he “wasn’t interested in doing only the minimum.”
“I want to do as much as we can all while being fiscally responsible,” he said. “And I think the $36 million is the most fiscally responsible thing we can do right now.”
Council president Harry Nolting, too, said he thought the $36 million expansion a reasonable compromise. It would also relieve the council from looking to a portion of the new LIT to fund the jail.
“I think we were clear from the beginning that LIT was not for jail construction. We already have a jail LIT for that,” he said. “So it’s my opinion that we need to do this without spending the public safety LIT on it.
“There are plenty of other places where we need public safety funds.”
Commissioner T.J. Brink, however, who also served on a committee of local elected officials to oversee the jail design, said he thought the base bid a “solid proposal,” and he didn’t want to see the county spend all of its ARPA money on the jail.
He also said with so many Hoosier counties pursuing jail expansion projects, he couldn’t be sure that the county would need more room later.
“The shell is a maybe — maybe we’ll need it down the road, maybe we won’t,” he said.
Lechner, too, didn’t immediately express his support of doing anything less than the full $41 million project, as he suggested a week ago.
With the base bid including 104 new beds — and the alternates including another 94 beds — he claimed that the county had the opportunity to nearly double the size of the current expansion, but at “10% of the cost.”
“Costs are only going up,” he said. “This is going to cost more if not done now.
“What may cost $4 million now for 92 beds, when you come back, bid it again, do another bond issue, bring contractors back on site, it will cost you several times that.”
But in the end, the council voted unanimously to finance the $36 million, and in a meeting that directly followed, the commissioners awarded contracts associated with the project, officially kickstarting construction.
Among the many recommended contractors are local ones, including Wabash Utilities for an earth work contract at $621,998 and Skill Electric for the more than $3.2 million electrical contract.
The actions taken Tuesday bring a now years-long effort to something of an end.
The jail project actually began back in 2019 when the county council reinstated an old jail tax to help eventually pay for it all, but there was little progress made in 2020, largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The commissioners in 2021 then formed a jail committee to get things rolling again.
RQAW three years ago recommended the $32 million expansion, specifically the construction of an additional pod — more than doubling the jail’s current bed capacity — as well as a new, adjacent structure to house community corrections and probation.
The jail opened in 2007 to house 200 inmates, but it’s consistently been over capacity since. Community corrections, currently housed in the county’s old jail on North Eight Street, too, has overcrowding issues, among other maintenance problems commonly associated with old buildings.
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