County commissioners said they’re moving ahead with a $6-million-plus jail expansion plan without help from the Legislature, after an effort to secure support from local lawmakers fell apart Tuesday.
“We’re going to proceed with this plan with or without y’all,” Commission Chairman Tim Hodges told lawmakers.
Commissioners met Tuesday morning at the County Administration Building with Sheriff Matthew Wade and three state House members — Barbara Boyd, D-Anniston; Koven Brown, R-Jacksonville; and Ginny Shaver, R-Leesburg — to discuss the county’s plans to expand its jail to add roughly 100 new beds.
Wade and other local officials have long complained of overcrowding and short staffing at the county’s facilities in Anniston. The county jail has space for about 400 people, Wade said Tuesday. In recent years, they’ve housed around 700 inmates at peak times of the year. The county in 2018 leased Anniston’s city jail for use as a women-only facility.
A completely new jail would cost between $25 million and $40 million, according to architects’ estimates. County officials have instead drafted a plan for a new wing and renovations that would add about 100 beds to the facility.
“I’m not trying to provide a Marriott experience,” Wade said. “I’m just trying to be constitutional and treat human beings the way they ought to be treated.”
Wade said proposed expansion would include a medical wing, a new booking area and an improved holding area for inmates who are on watch for mental issues.
“We have a high number of suicidal inmates and a high number of mentally ill inmates,” Wade said.
In Alabama, counties have little power to raise money without approval from the Legislature. With the legislative session a week away, Hodges and other commissioners sat down with lawmakers to talk about the issue — though Hodges didn’t lay any specific funding proposals on the table, and lawmakers didn’t offer plans of their own.
The state has its own prison overcrowding problem to deal with. Facing likely court intervention to alleviate overcrowding in state prisons, lawmakers have repeatedly discussed plans to build new men’s prisons. Faced with a price tag for those prisons that’s likely in the hundreds of millions of dollars, they’ve repeatedly punted on making a final decision on prison construction.
Wade said the state could alleviate its overcrowding more cheaply by giving money for jail expansion to counties, then allowing counties to hold some state inmates.
“Here’s a simple solution,” said Commissioner J.D. Hess. “Let the municipalities handle their own inmates.”
One lawmaker seemed to agree.
“One of the biggest mistakes that ever happened was when we let Oxford and Anniston and Jacksonville build their own jails,” said Brown. A centralized jail, he said, would have been more efficient.
Wade, in a telephone interview after the meeting, said moving inmates to city jails would be a “tall order,” possibly requiring a change to the state constitution, because of a requirement that felony defendants be held at the county jail. However, he said he understood county officials’ desire to see cities pick up more of the cost.
Boyd noted that she is on a committee that considers both county and municipal legislation — a position she described as a “hot seat” that would make that issue difficult to negotiate.
Hodges said the county intends to move forward even without the Legislature’s help.
“That’s not the position to put out there when you’re negotiating,” Boyd said.
The meeting ended with no agreement on any sort of legislation.
Hodges said the expansion would cost $6 million to $7 million, which the county could pay for with a bond issue. He said payment on that bond would likely cost $250,000 to $300,000, money that the county would try to find within its own budget if needed. He didn’t identify any cuts that would be made to pay for the bond repayment.
“I’d like to see us reach an answer on this in the next 90 days,” he said.