EVANSVILLE — The expansion of the Vanderburgh County Jail may cost as much as $40 million, according to the Jail Task Force, a committee consisting of law enforcement, judicial and county officials, and stakeholders.
Their goal is to build two housing units, each containing 300 beds.
"The good news is that we'll be able to finance using this scenario — a 600-bed jail, which will alleviate the overcrowding at the jail and add staff," Commissioner Cheryl Musgrave said Tuesday, after presenting a draft budget. "The bad news is that the budget is tight."
Commissioners will ask Council Wednesday for $1 million to begin the engineering design on the jail expansion. The documents Musgrave presented to the committee Tuesday outlined the annual costs of the jail expansion with a 25-year bond, but the task force is also looking at a 30-year loan approach. No decisions have been made.
"That very first year (2019) we could issue a $40 million bond and start paying on it, so we decided to take a different approach," Musgrave said. "There are other approaches we could take as well, but just to take out enough to pay the construction costs until we need to pay the whole thing. Then you kick off the bond when the big bill comes in."
The jail is currently understaffed, and additional personnel would cost between $500,000 to $1 million to meet current needs, according to Vanderburgh County Sheriff Dave Wedding.
Wedding said the inmate increase has been steadily growing over the years and another facility is needed to offset continuous overcrowding and understaffing. An increase in inmates is a "risk in liability" to the community and sheriffs office, Wedding said.
"We brought money in from the Department of Corrections that allowed us to take a certain number of guards from community corrections and put them into the Vanderburgh County Jail," Wedding said. "That's significantly helped our problem, initially, but we're still trying to fill all the voids so we can have every shift staffed adequately."
The operational costs of the new jail would be around $2 million annually, according to the draft. The new units will be able to house juveniles separate from adults. The current landscape doesn't ensure that, Wedding said.
Wedding said the federal government has an overload of federal prisoners too.
"I've reached out to them, saying 'If we were to build, would you want to utilize our jail as a place to house some of your federal inmates to ease your housing issues?' And they seem to be interested," Wedding said. "It would help offset the cost of operating our jail if we were to house a certain number of federal inmates."
Musgrave said, "we spend plus or minus $2 million a year to house prisoners outside of the county. Once the new jail is available, then that money is available to finance what we have going on here."
The committee will meet again in a month to review another draft, Musgrave confirmed.