New jail may be downsized

By FRITZ MAYER

MONTICELLO, NY — The good news is that the county’s credit rating looks pretty good, right now. The bad news is when you add $100 million in new debt, the county’s credit starts to look a bit risky and that means it will cost a lot more for the county to borrow money.

That was the essence of the message from consultant Stephen Lynch of R.S. Lynch & Company in a presentation to Sullivan County lawmakers on January 17.

Lynch said the cost of the new jail that lawmakers plan to build will be about $100 million, which is not far off from previous projections. He also said that if the county chose to stay with the old jail, which is aging and too small, the cost to operate it over the next 20 years would be $587 million. He said if the county chooses to build the new jail as planned, the cost over the next 20 years would be $641 million.

His projections took into account the cost of maintaining the current jail, which at about 108 years of age is reportedly the oldest county jail in the state. The projection also took into account the cost of exporting inmates to facilities outside the county.

It might seem, therefore, that staying with the current jail is the more economical choice. It is not, however, one that lawmakers are free to entertain. The New York State Department of Correctional Services has mandated that the county build a new jail. Kathy LaBuda, one of the lawmakers spearheading the jail project, said that if officials from Albany came down and padlocked the old jail, the county would have to pay to export some 200 inmates to other facilities and that the cost would be crippling.

The current jail has a capacity of 207 inmates and, typically, a few are transferred each week to facilities out of the county. Preliminary plans for the new jail called for a capacity of 400 beds, but the cost has led lawmakers to reconsider.

Lynch pointed out that because the county has no funding from other sources, such as the state, the county must bear the entire burden of the debt, which would add about $4 million per year to the county budget. And without new resources, such as payments from a casino, the funding will almost certainly have to come from increased property taxes.

That led Labuda to say, “There’s no way this county can afford that.”

And Leni Binder, who is the other lawmaker spearheading the project, said of the current jail plan, “Whatever it will be, this is not it.”

Lawmakers have committed that the building will incorporate green elements, such as geothermal and solar technologies, because even though those elements will initially add a bit to construction costs, they will more than pay for themselves in the operation of the facility.

The most realistic option to bring down the cost of the new jail is to look at a smaller facility. If there are no casinos in the county’s future, the inmate population may grow less quickly than projected. Labella Associates, the company acting as the project manager for the jail project, is due to present new projections to the lawmakers over the next week or two as to what the savings might be with a substantially smaller jail.