Decision on Monroe County jail location could come towards late August: ‘We can’t keep putting this off.’

Monroe County commissioners could be making a decision about the location of a new jail as soon as six weeks from now, by the end of August.

That’s based on their remarks made at their regular Wednesday morning meeting, and responses from board of commissioners president Julie Thomas after the meeting to B Square questions.

The commissioners did not have an item on their agenda about the location of the planned new jail. But they took the chance at the start of the meeting after department updates to talk about the need to push forward with a decision about the location of a new jail.

An estimated cost of delay was the highlight of a table presented by commissioner Penny Githens, comparing the Fullerton Pike property, the Thomson PUD, and the North Park PUD off West Hunter Valley Road. The table is included below.

It is the North Park PUD that is currently the focus of investigation by the commissioners as a potential new jail site. The table presented by Githens put the purchase price for the North Park land at $11,375,000.

Githens said, “It’s time to make a decision. We can’t keep putting this off.” She added, “And I hope that we can work with our county council colleagues to get something done expeditiously.”

Commissioners Julie Thomas and Lee Jones echoed the urgency that Githens had conveyed.

Responding to a message from The B Square, county councilor Geoff McKim agreed with the need to move ahead now, writing, “I appreciate the commissioners’ sense of urgency on this project. I do agree that there are costs to delay.”

McKim also cautioned that the county council, as the fiscal body, needs to do its due diligence on a decision that will affect the community for the decades to come. “The council needs to do their due diligence to make sure that the taxpayers aren’t paying more than they need to,” McKim wrote.

McKim wants the county council to hold a work session “in the very near future” to plan a budget for the jail project—because the cost estimates and bonding and tax revenue options have now been provided, McKim wrote. “We need to have a special session—at least one—dedicated to formulating a budget for the project,” he concluded.

The late August timeframe stems from two considerations.

First, the Phase 2 environmental study for the North Park property is expected to be completed by mid-August, according to county attorney Jeff Cockerill. If there are deal-breaking environmental issues with the North Park property the Phase 2 study should reveal them.

Second, there’s a certain amount of pre-design work that can be done, independent of any site selection. And that part of the pre-design work is already being done—by DLZ Corporation, led by Scott Carnegie, working with jail transition director Cory Grass, and Monroe County sheriff Ruben Marté.

Carnegie has previously described the pre-design phase as including programming, master planning, and conceptual design. The programming phase is not site-specific, whereas master planning and conceptual design depend on a specific site.

According to Cockerill, the part of the predesign work that doesn’t depend on a specific site selection is expected to be completed by the end of August. After that, the rest of the predesign work can’t move ahead until a site is selected.

That means if a site is not determined by the end of August, then the delay between finishing the first part of pre-design, and the decision on a jail site, could be blamed squarely on a failure to make a timely decision on the jail location.

While Thomas indicated that the end of August was conceivable for a decision on the jail, she gave “the fall” as a realistic timeframe by which commissioners plan to have a decision made. But if something goes “pear-shaped” with the North Park site, that will “push our clock again,” Thomas said.

Under state law, the county council has to approve the purchase of any new significant property, regardless of how it is funded.

The cost of delay is a big element of the table that Githens presented at Wednesday’s meeting. She used an estimate of 5 percent of hard construction costs, per year of delay. That’s within the range that jail transition director Cory Grass gave at a June 5 community meeting held at the Ellettsville first station.

“Every year that we wait to do something, conservatively, costs us 3 to 5 percent. Some people say as high as 12 percent,” Grass said.

For the Monroe Convention center expansion project, the cost of delay that’s been used by the Monroe capital improvement board (CIB), is around $150,000 to $160,000 per month, which translates into 3.5 to 3.7 percent annually, assuming a $52-million hard construction cost for the convention center expansion.

Attending Wednesday’s meeting was Randy Cassady, who is the Republican challenger to Julie Thomas in the Nov. 5 election for the District 2 county commissioner seat. Asked by the B Square for his reaction to the comments by commissioners about the new jail, Cassady focused on the table that Githens presented.

“What are the facts behind the spreadsheet that was presented in regards to showing the best dollar value?” Cassady asked. Cassady said that the table presented by Githens had no detail about where the estimates came from. Cassady also wondered if the information presented in Githens’s table had been discussed with the county council.

It is now roughly three years since the county’s two consultants delivered reports, one of which concluded that Monroe County’s jail is “failing” and is not able to provide constitutional levels of care.

The jail currently operates under a 2009 settlement agreement with the ACLU, which filed a lawsuit over crowded conditions at the jail. The settlement agreement has been extended several times.