New jail site selection, transition team get attention from Monroe County officials
Planning for a new Monroe County jail appeared on meeting agendas for both the county council and the board of county commissioners this week.
For county councilors, it was a discussion with Monroe County sheriff Ruben Marté, chief deputy Phil Parker, and jail transition director Cory Grass—about a strategy for funding a transition team to be headed by Grass.
The source of transition team funding identified by county councilors is revenue from the corrections local income tax, which county councilors enacted last year.
For their part, county commissioners moved ahead with work on site selection for a new jail, by approving a $4,750 contract with VET Environmental Engineering, for a Phase 1 environmental site assessment of some land along West Hunter Valley Road and West SR 46.
This is the land that the county is now considering as a possible location for a new jail, after putting aside consideration of the Thomson PUD location, in south central Bloomington.
County commissioners also received an update from jail commander Kyle Gibbons, who gave them a rundown of the most recent jail population numbers: 164 felony inmates; 35 misdemeanor inmates, and 15 housed in the jail on other holds. Gibbons gave a nod to the circuit court judges for the pretrial release program, which is helping to keep the numbers down.
Gibbons also told the commissioners that the jail is fully staffed. There’s been just one resignation in the last 90 days, by someone who moved back to northern Indiana to be with family.
About the environmental assessment of the land along West Hunter Valley Road and West SR 46, administrator for the commissioners, Angie Purdie, noted that the total amount of land in the parcels is about 56 acres. Of that total, only about 43 acres is being considered for purchase, Purdie said.
Commissioner Lee Jones noted, “All of this seems to have been taking a lot longer than we had initially anticipated.”
Commissioner Penny Githens said she’s “anxious to move forward.” She described the current jail as “limping along,” saying that money has to be spent on significant projects like elevator replacement, just to keep the current jail in working order.
Commissioner Julie Thomas said she’s looking forward to learning about the property from the study.
It’s the third site that commissioners have seriously considered as a new jail location, including one in the south part of Bloomington, which rezone request was denied by Bloomington’s city council in late 2022.
About this third location, Thomas said, “Hopefully it works out. Fingers crossed.”
The night before, the county council heard from Monroe County sheriff Ruben Marté, chief deputy Phil Parker, and jail transition director Cory Grass about their request to fund a six-person transition team.
The funding for Grass, who was brought on board through a contract inked by the sheriff in mid-December last year, came from the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act). But as county councilor Geoff McKim put it on Tuesday night: “ARPA was great to get started. It’s not a viable path moving forward.”
The basic idea for assembling a transition team is to draw from current jail staff—but in order to do that, the jobs now being done by those staff will need to be backfilled. That’s what the additional funding will pay for.
On Tuesday night, the ballpark number used by county councilors for the six jail staff positions was $330,000 a year, without benefits. The amount of revenue generated in 2024 by the new jail local income tax (LIT), which was imposed by the county council last year, is $424,260.
So the existing new “jail tax” was identified by county councilors as a plausible source of funding for backfilling the jail transition team positions.
The council’s action last year to impose a new “jail tax”—which state law calls the “tax rate for correctional and rehabilitation facilities”—did not increase the county’s overall LIT rate.
That’s because the county council reduced by 0.01 points the LIT rate in a category called the special purpose LIT. But the council imposed, for the first time, a rate in the corrections LIT of 0.01 percent, matching the reduction in special purpose tax.
The special purpose LIT, which was previously imposed at a rate of 0.0950, is restricted under state statute to funding “the operation and maintenance of a juvenile detention center and other facilities to provide juvenile services.”
The reduction of the special rate to 0.0850 was judged by the county council to be a possibility, because the annual shortfall in the juvenile services budget could be covered for at least a decade based on the existing operations balance in the special purpose LIT.
An increase to the corrections rate could come later, once the site of a new jail is selected, its square footage is determined, and its construction cost is dialed in. But there’s a statutory limit on the jail tax rate of 0.2 percent.
Last year’s action on the jail tax left the overall rate paid by Monroe County taxpayers at 2.0350 percent. The overall cap on local income tax that can be imposed is 2.5 percent.
At Tuesday’s county council meeting, councilor Peter Iversen raised the question of whether the people hired to backfill the positions for members of the transition team should be considered “permanent positions.”
Chief deputy Phil Parker responded by saying that it was a bit “up in the air,” but as the transition to a new jail unfolds, if it becomes apparent that more jail staff are on board than are actually needed, then those numbers can be decreased through attrition.
Councilor Munson asked Parker if he recalled that during many of the discussions about the new jail, the idea had been discussed that fewer jail staff would be needed for the new facility, “because it would be designed in a way to make better use of personnel.”
Parker responded to Munson by saying: “I recall it. We’re highly skeptical of it!”
Based on county council discussion at Tuesday’s meeting, an appropriation for the funding of positions to backfill transition team members could appear on a county council agenda in the first part of April.
For B Square background on the question of the need for a new county jail, see: Monroe County sheriff, commissioners square off at committee meeting, ACLU lawyer says: “Look, you need a new jail. Everyone knows that.”
