Clark County will need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to keep its increasingly cramped and outdated jail functional while meeting the goals of its fledgling inmate re-entry program, according to research from a consulting firm unveiled at a county work session on Tuesday.
The findings are the latest from DLR Group, a facilities consulting firm with offices in Portland and Seattle, that the county hired last year for $300,000 to assess the facility. Last month, the DLR Group released its initial report, which concluded the building is structurally sound but suffers from a backlog of deferred maintenance and systems that need to be replaced or repaired.
The study also concluded that the jail needs to be 366,564 square feet to meet industry best practices but only has 124,318 square feet (excluding its work center). The consultants found that the jail will need to have 1,109 to 1,260 beds by 2036, more than its current 793-bed capacity.
On Tuesday, consultants presented the county council with three plans to solve these problems, and estimates for how much it would cost.
The first would renovate the jail at a cost of $63 million to $67 million but would fall significantly short on goals of increasing elbow room and bed count.
The second plan would cost between $253 million and $268 million and would add new buildings for administration and inmate housing on Ingalls Street. While the plan would nearly solve the capacity and bed problems, its layout would be inefficient, and Corrections Chief Ric Bishop said it would create safety issues for deputies.
“I know I had sticker shock,” said Bishop during the work session.
The “preferred” plan would cost between $268 million and $284 million and would bring the jail up to industry square-foot standards while bringing the bed count up to 1,028 by 2022. The plan included options to phase in the upgrades at reduced cost. While doing so could reduce the initial price tag to between $188 million and $221 million, Bill Valdez, a principal of the firm, noted that the county could end up paying more later if construction costs rise.
Carla Weinheimer, an architect with DLR, said that the plans were designed to be “future-proof,” meaning that some space would be left available so new structures could be built to accommodate future needs. She said the preferred plan would remove a parking structure but would keep a parking lot.
“How parking gets managed is always a discussion,” said Weinheimer. “And so you would just have less of it.”
More than a jail
During the work session, Bishop explained that the role of the county jail has expanded in recent decades and has involved greater collaboration with community service organizations.
“We don’t just lock people up,” he said.
Bishop said that the preferred master plan was developed with input from other organizations, including the Washington State Patrol and the Vancouver Police Department, which he said included some “lively discussions.”
During the work session, Bishop presented numbers showing that Clark County’s incarceration rate in 2016 was 155 per 100,000 people in 2016, slightly lower than the state’s overall. He also said the jail’s re-entry program has shown success in reducing recidivism. But after the meeting, Bishop said that the lack of space in the jail is constraining the re-entry program. He said there are 28 organizations in Clark County interested in working with inmates, but there isn’t room for them.
Council Chair Marc Boldt asked if the preferred master plan would fulfill the functions of a behavioral health crisis triage and stabilization center, which Clark and Skamania counties requested state money for. After the meeting, Bishop said that the preferred plan would increase capacity for the triage, assessment and classification of inmates, but it wouldn’t replicate the work of the proposed center. He said the other plans would “kick the can down the road.”
“The mental health can is sitting on our desk right now,” said Boldt. “We can’t kick that one down the road.”
What’s next
After the meeting, Boldt said that now the potential costs of upgrading the facility are out, the next step is a community conversation about what the jail should do when it comes to re-entry, drug and alcohol treatment and mental health.
He said that the upgrades to the jail would be funded through a bond, but said that the county’s bonding capacity needs to be examined first.
