Thurston commission pauses $19 million jail expansion
Thurston County commissioners on Tuesday voted 2-1 to pause a plan to expand the county jail in light of economic uncertainty related to the COVID-19 public health crisis.
The board had unanimously approved the plan, estimated to cost at least $19 million, in November, following years of discussion around how to address ongoing crowding at the facility and feared litigation.
The November decision directed county staff to proceed with designing a 40-bed addition to the jail, plus a shell for future expansion. Before a bidding process for construction could start, the commissioners would need to decide whether to actually build the shell.
The county had since been negotiating a supplement to an existing contract with an architectural firm for the project’s design, according to County Manager Ramiro Chavez.
‘We’re going to have revenue losses’
The $2 million contract was ready to sign, Project Manager Chris Helmer told commissioners Tuesday, and the architectural firm needed to know whether the county was moving forward soon or it would reassign its employees to other projects.
But Commissioners Tye Menser and Gary Edwards, who were reluctant to support the project in the first place, opted to pause it altogether.
Driving their decision were the looming, unknown impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on county revenue.
“There’s a financial hole being dug for us right now, and it’s still being dug,” Menser said in a phone interview Friday, echoing his comments at the Tuesday briefing. “We don’t know when it’s going to stop deepening or how deep it will end up being.”
Capital funding for the jail was slated to come from a real estate excise tax, and operational funding was to come from the county’s Detention Sales Tax and its general fund, Assistant County Manager Robin Campbell said at Tuesday’s meeting.
In a phone interview Friday, Campbell told The Olympian she expects the county to experience revenue losses “across the board,” with some revenue sources feeling it more than others. The board has only begun to have conversations about what they might do to mitigate impact, she said
“We’re going to have revenue losses,” Campbell said. “How much and how long are still to be determined.”
In light of the bleak, if vague, economic outlook, Menser argued pausing was the only option.
“The only reasonable thing we can do right now is to put a pause on financial commitments that are not absolutely essential until we start to see a reopening of the economy and we have a sense of what our economic recovery will look like,” Menser said Friday.
During the discussion ahead of Tuesday’s vote, County Manager Chavez proposed the commissioners consider going forward with the design, which Helmer said was slated to take eight months, then revisit whether to commit to construction after that.
Commissioner John Hutchings, who serves as chair of the board, ultimately aligned with Chavez’s suggestion and was the lone no vote in completely pausing the project. While he understood the other commissioners’ concerns, Hutchings told The Olympian he wasn’t content with not moving forward at all.
“I don’t like to just sit idle and do nothing, tread water,” Hutchings said. “I like to be making progress.”
The Sheriff sees the latest in a series of setbacks
The board’s decision was met with disappointment from Sheriff John Snaza, who told The Olympian Friday he’s unclear what exactly the pause means — a frustrating prospect after years of discussion and newfound momentum.
“It really is disheartening, because I am responsible for the health and care of all the inmates in my jail,” Snaza said in a phone interview. “I am, they’re not. They don’t work there, they don’t deal with it. I do. The men and women there are saying this is what they need, and the county commissioners aren’t listening.”
He also was frustrated by Commissioner Menser’s budget worries, saying that all departments are budget-focused and he hasn’t heard a real plan to fix the budget from the commissioner.
But Menser told The Olympian everything has changed with the pandemic.
“Prior to COVID-19, I was worried about balancing the budget, because 2020 will have been the fifth straight year of deficit spending and a reduction in our fund balance,” Menser said Friday. “I previously committed to reversing that trend, but now everything is completely up in the air with the revenue hits we’re going to feel from the COVID-19 crisis.”
This isn’t the first time a plan to expand the jail has been derailed by a faltering economy: The county originally intended for the current jail to be built in phases, corrections officials say, but a “Phase II” that was supposed to add 256 beds to the facility was indefinitely delayed when the recession hit 12 years ago.
The 40-bed addition approved in November already was a scaled-back version of what corrections officials were initially expecting.
Limitations on how beds and cells can be used causes an overflow of maximum-custody and special-needs inmates, officials say — even with the inmate population thinning out due to efforts local justice system officials are undertaking in light of the pandemic.
On Wednesday, Snaza told the board just under 240 inmates were housed at the facility. That’s down by 45 inmates since The Olympian reported numbers about two weeks ago, when the population was already down 20% compared to the previous month.
But the majority of people released from the jail have been low-risk defendants living in the jail’s open dormitories, while the maximum-custody and special needs inmate populations have only dropped from 81 to 72 since March 1, Chief Deputy of Corrections Todd Thoma said at the briefing Tuesday.
Overflow inmates end up being housed in temporary holding cells in the jail’s intake area, without permanent beds, according to The Olympian’s previous reporting. And women classified as maximum-custody or special-needs are housed in the transfer area.
Snaza said Friday he is frustrated by the commissioners’ decision, in part, because he doesn’t think that female population should be treated differently than their male counterparts. The jail had been working with Disability Rights Washington and other advocacy groups, according to The Olympian’s previous reporting, to alleviate the situation.
As he has before, Snaza said Friday he fears a lawsuit if the jail doesn’t expand.
In an April 15 letter addressed to the county commissioners, Kimberly Mosolf, the director of DRW’s Treatment Facilities Program who was previously part of its Amplifying Voices of Inmates with Disabilities program, clarified that the organization’s involvement with the jail does not create pressure or a need for jail expansion.
In The Olympian’s previous reporting, Mosolf voiced that DRW understood the addition of a new “flex unit” was part of a “multi-pronged approach to the problem.”
The organization had made several requests, such as increasing programming and access to care for jail inmates with disabilities, the recent letter reads, but did not suggest that an increase in jail beds was the solution. The jail has implemented some of DRW’s suggestions, according to the letter, including adding mental health staff in the jail.
“To be clear, DRW generally opposes the expansion of jails and prisons in Washington state,” the letter reads.
What could happen next
Still, there seems to be near-universal acknowledgment among county officials that the jail needs more cells, given the history of Phase II and ongoing crowding.
In a parallel process, local officials have been exploring the possibility of a regional jail. After the November plan was approved, Commissioner Menser says he learned Olympia’s jail was in disrepair and the city would soon need to make a major investment. Meanwhile, Lacey and Tumwater had some concerns about their contracts with the tribal jail in Nisqually, he said.
Enter the idea of a regional jail, which would require the jurisdictions to agree on governance and funding.
Menser says Snaza and Thurston County Prosecutor Jon Tunheim were interested in the idea, and in February, Menser mentioned it to the Olympia City Council. Now Marc Daily, executive director of the Thurston Regional Planning Council, is remotely interviewing stakeholders to build what Menser called “a laundry list of concerns” and see whether there’s a process that might address them.
But Snaza told The Olympian Friday that he’s “not OK with a regional jail” because he’s not confident Thurston and Olympia share the same vision of how to run their facilities. He’s more interested in providing contract housing.
It’s possible concerns won’t be able to be resolved, Menser said, but he “wanted to make sure there wasn’t a chance to do something even better for the community” before spending money on the new unit.
At the end of Tuesday’s meeting, Commissioner Edwards said he’d like to revisit the topic in two weeks. In the meantime, staff is looking at how long it would take and how much it would cost to explore other options for finding more space for inmates, according to County Manager Chavez.
This story was originally published April 20, 2020 at 5:45 AM.
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