The county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously accepted a conditional $80 million grant from the Board of State and Community Corrections, marking the biggest step toward solving the county’s jail overcrowding problem that has plagued the local justice system for nearly 30 years.
“I commend the Board of Supervisors for their bold action today,” sheriff Bill Brown stated in a release Tuesday, shortly after the hearing. “Inadequate jail capacity in our county continues to be a worsening problem that has been in search of a solution with eight previous boards. (Tuesday’s) decision paves the way – once and for all – for a much-needed North County Jail to be built. This was a true team accomplishment.”
Board members supported a resolution to support the state award toward construction of the $96.1 million, 376-bed jail, which will require the county to match 10%, or $8.8 million. Sheriff Brown applied for the grant in January and secured a boon offered to 11 counties vying for a share in $602 million in funding from the state under AB 900, which passed in 2008 to reduce overcrowding in jails.
The state aid couldn’t have come at a more opportune time, after last year’s passage of Assembly Bill 109, also known as public safety realignment. The law shifts responsibility for housing and supervising non-serious, nonviolent, non-sex-related offense offenders, who were previously the responsibility of the state, to county sheriffs and probation departments. Since October 2011, 772 inmates have passed through the jail and 614 of them have been released. The number of “non-non-non” offenders remitted to county custody was 26% higher than anticipated, Brown noted.
The current jail was designed 30 years ago as a minimum-security or ‘honor farm’ to house low-level offenders but now functions as a medium-security facility intended for petty criminals. The jail is now used for more serious criminals. “The overwhelming numbers of inmates currently housed in the facility are felons,” Brown said. The jail is rated to handle 788 prisoners, but in September it had 1,023 inmates. Approximately 83% are felons and 17% are misdemeanants. That mix should be even, Brown said.
“AB 109 changed the face of correction in California,” Brown told the board. “It has exacerbated the overcrowding problem and has made the need for a new jail more pressing and more acute than ever.”
Brown estimates that the new jail will break ground in July 2015 and open in March 2018 on a 50-acre parcel at Black Road and Betteravia Road near Santa Maria. The jail’s price tag stands at $96.1 million, $6.4 million of which has already been budgeted. To satisfy the state’s requirement for the grant, the county proposes to use $3 million currently held in a committed fund balance account for jail operations; $5.3 million of the $30.1 million currently in the county’s strategic reserve; and $600,000 currently held in the Sheriff’s Department’s Proposition 172 restricted fund balance account.
The county may borrow all or a portion of the funds through debt issuance, but Brown advised against this because the county would pay an extra $6 million in interest over the life of the project.
Although the fund shuffle allows the county to move ahead, the board still needs to flesh out details about how to pay for ongoing operations of the jail.
Supervisors plan on holding a workshop to reassess the matter at a future date. Operating the jail in fiscal year 2018-19 will cost $17 million. This includes hiring 95 of the 118 full-time employees who will work at the jail, 57 of which will be sworn employees of various ranks and 38 civilian employees. The rest will be transferred from the current jail.
Brown and County Chief Executive Officer Chandra Wallar have devised a 20-year operations financing plan in which the county would make slowly ascending contributions from the county’s general fund. Three million dollars has already been set aside for jail operations. County officials call this a “laddered approach” as growth revenue is piled into a growing nest egg for consumption through fiscal year 2022-23.
The general fund is expected to grow 2% next year or by $4 million, some of which is already committed to county Fire, county budget director Tom Alvarez told the board. The projected savings for operating costs, which will balloon to $33 million in fiscal year 17-18, will come from roughly 25% of anticipated general fund growth, Alvarez added.
First District Supervisor Salud Carbajal lauded Brown for his leadership and said he had no doubt he would see the new jail come to fruition, but, echoing concerns from other board members, he said he worried about the overall cost to the county.
“The $17 million is the rub,” he said. “We’re between a rock and a hard place. We have a large amount of money the state has dangled in front of our face, but moving this facility forward is no doubt going to be a strain on the rest of the county.”
Brown admitted the operating cost will be “a tough nut to crack,” but said the cost of employees is expected to be lower than anticipated because of a pension-reform law that was recently signed by the governor. “It’s safe to assume these numbers will be substantially reduced as a result of reductions in pension costs,” he stated.
Supervisors Carbajal and Doreen Farr were also concerned that closing the current 285-bed medium security jail (which the sheriff called “Santa Barbara’s rambling version of Winchester Mystery House”), which is factored into the sheriff’s cost-savings plan, could lead to another overcrowding crisis in the future.
“We really need a bigger facility,” Carbajal said. “I’m not advocating for one, though, because we don’t have the money.”
Brown said key to preventing overcrowding are intervention and prevention programs.
“I don’t think anybody thinks this jail is going to be the silver bullet,” Brown said. “So we’re really trying to strike a balance between what the needs are, what the economic realities are and what the opportunity now is to get this funding from the state.”
Eight boards and eight sheriffs have grappled with the jail overcrowding issue. The county received a $56 million award in 2008 under Phase I of the AB 900 Jail Construction Financing Program. But the economic downturn made finding the 25% in matching funds “too burdensome to achieve,” Brown told the board in December. Brown had tried to fill that gap at the polls in the form of Measure S, a half-cent sales tax increase for jail funds, but the measure was rejected by most voters. jfoster@syvjournal.com