By Gail Binkly

Montezuma County commissioners Gene Story and Kelly Wilson, along with County Administrator Tom Weaver, sat down with the Cortez Journal and Dolores Star on Monday to answer questions about the proposal on the November ballot for a 0.45-cent sales tax to finance a new county jail, as well as an expanded community-corrections program and detox center to be housed in the old jail facility.

The tax would pay for a $6.26 million bond to finance a $5.5 million, 110-bed facility. Operating costs for the jail, detox, and community-corrections program of $270,000 a year are also included in the bond price tag, along with a reserve fund. The tax would end when the bond is paid off, in 20 years or sooner. The current jail, built for 46 inmates, regularly holds 90 or more.

The interview has been edited for length.

STAR: Where do the commissioners stand on the jail proposal?

STORY: (At the time that) we started to see a high number of inmates, we formed a jail assessment team to do research into options. We looked at redesigning the old justice complex or building a new complex. It was their recommendation that a new facility be built. Based on a lot of other issues, code violations and stuff, if we were going to redo the old justice building we’d have to address a lot of expensive items, so it just made sense to build a new facility. The commission has always stood behind it.

STAR: And you purchased that land (39 acres west of Mildred Road and north of Empire) for a new facility, whether it’s federally mandated or passed by the voters.

STORY: Yes. That was a piece of property that was probably closest to not only the city municipal facilities but our courts and things like that. It only made sense.

JOURNAL: Since the jail sales tax failed last year, some people feel that you did something devious and tricky by tinkering with the amount of the sales tax to put this on the ballot again. (State law does not allow identical tax questions to be put on the ballot two years in a row, so the commissioners changed the tax from 0.5 cents to 0.45.) Why did you feel it was so urgent you couldn’t wait another year?

WILSON: Mainly my idea was the safety of the personnel working there. We talked about adding add-on jail cells, but then the storage, and safety again, was another problem. And you ran into a kitchen there that’s supposed to handle 46 people and it’s straining at the gills right now, so to add more people wasn’t going to help any. Besides, that jail committee showed us the need for the community-corrections portion of it, too.

STORY: I think it’s only prudent from our standpoint to try to move this project along. Our options are limited. We could have waited another year, but liability -- this year when we received our liability (insurance) bids, I think we had just a couple. And one of the reasons we’re not getting many liability quotes is there’s too much liability associated with the jail. So even though people may say we’re jumping the gun, we’re trying to avoid potential litigation in the future, to get our liability rates down.

And the safety issue -- these are not all just minor offenses these people have committed. We have some hardcore inmates out there, and they pose a threat. They pose a threat to the employees of the sheriff’s department; they pose a threat if they should get out.

JOURNAL: Related to that, we had a letter to the editor from Neva Kindred saying that the jail plan was overbuilt -- too secure for the number of dangerous inmates that we have.

STORY: My response is I’m glad it’s overbuilt. I’d rather see an overbuilt facility than one like that facility we have.

WILSON: If we had those three people that killed the cop here a year ago in that jail right now, would you feel safe with it? And that’s the kind of people we’re getting. Overbuilt? Not by a long shot.

STORY: Obviously in today’s dollars it’s cheaper to build a facility like this now than five years from now -- and hopefully we can build a facility that will serve our needs for a number of years. And we do have a plan for adding on so that 10, 20 years from now we don’t have a strapped-in facility. But I think we need to start with a good foundation.

WILSON: At the same time we need to really be looking at other programs like -- what did we have, McGruff (the crime dog)? -- preventive maintenance, I guess.

JOURNAL: When people hear that the jail is overcrowded and people sleep on the floor and don’t have mattresses and so on, they say, ‘Well, tough. Pack them in there. Why should I pay for better treatment for inmates?’ What’s the down side if this proposal fails and people just don’t want to build a new jail?

STORY: Where does that leave us? Well, those problems are not going to go away, obviously. The one thing we have to look at is privatization. We haven’t wanted to address that because we wanted to try one more time to try to get this.

Privatization is working in some areas and in a lot of areas it’s probably not working. This is what’s happening in New Mexico. I don’t think it is an area where we want to go, but we may not have a choice. The down side of privatization is, the way they make money is bringing in inmates from the outside. We visited with several institutions that do that; they try to paint a rosy picture, but there seem to be a number of problems. (With a private facility) the sheriff is still in charge. He’s still the ultimate caretaker of the jail, no matter who’s running it. So he has to be a real big part of this, and the county is still liable.

Essentially what you do is turn over your operations budget to that facility, so if our operations budget is $650,000 a year, we turn that over to this institution and they guarantee us a certain number of beds. If we want more than that number we have to pay.

WILSON: There’s an economic side of this that looks pretty good but at the same time there’s another side of it that doesn’t. You go to a private jail and, first of all, they’ve got to jump the numbers. Instead of 100 beds, they’ve got to get 250, 300 or more. Then if you have a prison inmate from Grand Junction and one from Denver and the one kills the other, the taxpayers have to pay the court costs and everything else because it happened in the county.

STORY: The other side of this thing, too, is what happened in Mesa County. Mesa County is under a federal mandate to build a new jail. It’s a long drawn-out process and it occurred before Amendment One, which also kind of skews the whole thing, but essentially what they do is come down and say, based on some incident where an inmate was injured and filed suit, or some organization filed suit -- once it gets to that level, you start losing control and that’s what we’re afraid of having happen.

Either a state or a federal judge can impose that on us and say, ‘You start construction. You start construction and you come up with a mill levy.’ People may not have the choice of a sales tax. I think we lose some choices if it comes this way so that’s another reason we’re trying to move this thing along and get the support of the community.

JOURNAL: Why can’t you use space in the Towaoc jail?

STORY: I guess it’s going to take a little pressure off our jail to the tune of about four beds. It’s a totally different situation down there. They’re going to be bringing a lot of their inmates that are incarcerated in other areas back there to find a way to get treatment, because they have a treatment facility there. It’s just not an option for us to use many beds there.

JOURNAL: And of course you have to pay transportation costs.

STORY: We haven’t seriously pursued a regional jail for those reasons, transportation to the courts and all this.

JOURNAL: When the sales tax sunsets, the operating costs sunset. What do you expect to happen then?

STORY: I would hope at that time a proposal could be made to reinstate that, based on the history of how the facility was run, and if it’s been run well and if people feel good about it ... and who’s to say what things will look like 15 years from now.

JOURNAL: It’s traditionally been pretty difficult to get people to vote for tax increases or bonds for recreation centers, schools, libraries, fire districts -- all of which are more attractive than a jail which most people hope they will never need to use. How do you persuade people that there really is a need for a new jail?

STORY: Well, I think the history of the past several years should be a good indicator. I also would urge anybody that has any serious question in their own mind to go visit that jail and ask themselves one question: Would they like to work there? Then ask themselves a different question: If they had a son or relative, would they want him to be incarcerated there? I think if they can answer those questions, they can probably come up with a sound decision.

WILSON: It’s not a resort, that’s for sure, and it’s not going to be. For instance the TV and some of the other stuff will be paid for by the patrons themselves through using the commissary, things like that, because that is not included in the price of the jail.

Again, I go back to the safety. You need to know where your people are. You go out there right now and you have people back there by themselves and they have no visual connection with the office. You’re hung out there by yourself. Frankly, there’s more people going into the jail these days with less thought of life as a precious thing. You start cramming these people in and it’s dangerous. It’s an entirely different thing than schools and recreation units, but we’re mandated. We have to provide a jail, by state statute, and we’re hoping that the people will see the thing through.

STORY: The average person would much rather spend that sales tax on something they themselves could enjoy, no question. At the same time, we are supposedly a land of laws, and order, and I think we have an obligation to provide a facility that is decent.

A lot of people say, ‘Hey, I could care less what that inmate’s doing out there, how he’s being treated,’ but that’s no way to think. We need a facility so when those people come out of there, hopefully they’re not going to return. We’re looking at a community-corrections program -- that has come out of the fact that recidivism is so high out there. It’s like a revolving door in our facility. So we need to address a lot of these issues. We have to have a facility that is a safe working environment and hopefully we can spend a little more time addressing where we’re breaking down out there, because right now it’s just a holding facility. We can’t do any counseling or anything else.