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Jail bond has long history and growing need
Sheriff Rick Layher is tired of bandaids, tired of having to constantly "patch" his jail to meet ever evolving standards.
So for the fourth time in 11 years the county will ask the voters to approve a $7.5 million new jail facility on May 24.
It won't house the entire Sheriff's Department, like the first proposal in 1994 could have done. The county can't afford that any more. The latest iteration of the jail proposal, which is virtually identical to the one narrowly defeated by the voters last fall, is designed exclusively to house the expanding county's growing load of offenders that judges believe need to be removed from society and sent to jail.
If the bond doesn't pass, Layher doesn't know what he'll do, but privately fears the courts may eventually shut him down. Last fall, Elmore County was rated as having the third worst jail in the state. Since then, the two jails above it on the list have been shut down by judicial order, those counties forced to house their prisoners in other facilities at the set rate of $45 per prisoner per day.
Layher already has to send some of his prisoners out of county because the current facility isn't big enough, or configured properly to meet the newer requirements of separation for different categories of prisoners.
Thirty-one years ago, in 1974, when the current jail was built, it looked like a facility that would handle all the county's needs for a very long time. It replaced an old facility in the basement of the courthouse, and allowed the city to give up its own jail where the city council chambers are now located.
The half-million-dollar facility built at that time required only $155,000 of taxpayer's money from a bond to build, the rest coming from federal grants (which no longer exist). It was designed for 32 prisoners, more than enough to meet the county's needs in those days, and also housed both the Sheriff's Department and the city police department.
In 1974 the sheriff wasn't required to separate juveniles from adults, murderers from DUI offenders, and it was extremely rare to have a female prisoner. It wasn't necessary to give prisoners access to daylight or exercise, nor was hot food even mandatory.
"But then," Layher said, "in the early '80s we started getting sued over jail conditions." Some changes were made in 1986 to provide an outside exercise area for prisoners. Then, in 1988, the county was named in a major class action lawsuit that triggered a number of significant changes in the facility and its operation. Layher formed a citizen's committee to help review what needed to be done, and entered into a consent decree to make the necessary changes.
More jailers were hired to provide better security, in part to prevent escapes but also to protect prisoners from each other.
A new ventilation system was installed, the sally port (where patrol cars can unload prisoners) was converted to an indoor exercise area for days when weather prevented use of the outdoor "dog run," as it is known, windows to provide natural light were installed, and hot food designed to meet specific dietary standards was provided.
Beds also were taken out to provide a greater square footage for inmates as required by evolving laws, dropping capacity to 18 prisoners, although Layher was able to find a way to get that back up to 20, and, by adding more "bandaids" as he calls them, actually can now house up to 23 prisoners if conditions are just right.
But they rarely are. In the early '90s, a juvenile by the name of Pederman, jailed on a misdemeanor, was put in a cell with an adult prisoners with a violent history, and beaten to death in the Ada County Jail, prompting a series of judicial rules and state laws that required different classes of prisoners be separated from each other (the details of the separation rules will be covered in another story in this series on the jail bond).
Murderers, for example, must be isolated in their own cells, and currently, Elmore County has three individuals in jail either facing murder charges or waiting to be sentenced after having been convicted of murder.
In fact, Layer noted, if all the "wrong" classes of prisoners all showed up at once, the legal capacity of his jail could be reduced to as few as 7 or 8 prisoners.
It was around that time, in 1993, that it first became apparent to Layher that a new jail facility needed to be built.
But the first bond, for $4.5 million, didn't even win the support of the county commissioners who only reluctantly agreed to put it on the ballot.
In 1998, the county tried again, asking for a $7.5 million facility that would be both a jail and a joint city/county facility housing the offices of both the police department and the sheriff's department. The county commissioners at that time gave lukewarm support for the plan, and it also failed.
In 2001, the county spent $640,000 to purchase eight acres of land across from the golf course to provide a place for future expansion of county facilities, including a jail.
During 2000 and 2001 the city and the county considered using the certificates of participation process to build a new jail facility, whose price had risen to at least $9.5 million. That process would not have required a vote of the general public. At the same time, the city and county were engaged in an increasingly acrimonious dispute over cost sharing at the law enforcement building, and the LEB was literally bursting at the seams trying to house the growing staff of both the city and county law enforcement agencies.
Eventually, the city decided to go its own way, using certificates of participation to build a police station that would house police administrative offices, while keeping patrol officers housed at the "temporary" buildings in Richard Aguirre Park. The county didn't pursue the matter to use such certificates to build its own facility.
Moving the police department out of the Law Enforcement Building (LEB) freed up some space for Layher and his deputies, and allowed Layher to start putting up to 30 minimum security prisoners on work-release programs in the basement room that at one time had been a magistrate's court room.
But housing those prisoners, who go to work during the day and then return to the jail at night, in the basement room caused its own problems. The hanging ceiling tiles, for example, can easily be removed and Layher said it's not unusual to find prisoners wandering around the hallways in the basement at night.
In one case, such an "internal" escape actually allowed one set of prisoners to break into the evidence locker, steal some beer, and take a gun found in there and hide it. Jailers discovered the break-in and found the gun quickly, but it pointed out the growing security concerns Layher has with the "bandaids" he's been putting on the facility.
In November of 2004 the county once again went to the voters seeking a $7.5 million bond to build an expanded 60-bed jail facility, this time dropping any administrative offices (the sheriff and his deputies would remain at the LEB, which would become just an administrative facility).
The bond issue, offered at a time when the local economy was reeling from the effects of the national recession, failed by a narrow margin.
But the current county commissioners, who have strongly endorsed the need for a new facility, decided they should try again this spring.
The last bond contained a fairly large contingency fund, which has largely been eaten up by an $800,000 increase in the last six months in estimated construction costs.
The current $7.5 million bond proposal (about $6 a month for a $100,000 home), although identical in physical configuration, no longer has any pad in it, and the commissioners believe if it is delayed any longer, the cost will only go up.
Furthermore, the commissioners believe a new facility must be built, one way or another, not only to meet modern standards, but also to house the growing number of prisoners that are a product of a growing community.
Initially, the facility might be large enough to provide some "excess" beds, which Layher could then use to house prisoners from other counties, the way he currently uses other counties to house his prisoners. "I swear," he said, "we send so many prisoners over to Owyhee County now that we've paid for their new jail there." He said he's joked with the Owyhee County sheriff that it should be renamed the "Elmore County Annex."
But instead of spending $45 per day to send a prisoner to some other jail, with the new facility Layher could be making $45 a day housing someone else's prisoners. That revenue could be used to either help pay the bond back faster, or help cover some of the operating costs of the new jail.
Although the new facility is designed to reduce manpower while improving security, Layher expects that eventually he'll have to add one to three additional jailers as the population of the jail grows.
And the new facility won't last forever, either, he knows. At the county's current growth rate, the new jail would probably be able to handle the county's needs for the next 20 years, he believes. After that, it may need to be expanded, but the current proposal is designed for ease of expansion.
A new jail, Layher said, "isn't something that's just on my wish list. It's something we genuinely need to securely house the growing number of prisoners we have.
"We're not meeting current standards. The only reason we haven't been sued lately is the ACLU knows we're at least trying.
"It's something we have to have," he said.