County Commissioner Tim Boyd questioned spending $100,000 on a redesign at the Sliverdale jail during the commission’s Wednesday meeting. Representatives from the sheriff’s office said this money was needed to come up with a redesign of the intake area.
Information systems Ron Bernard said the original design of the intake and booking area was “heavily influenced” by CoreCivic. He said that once the Sheriff’s Office looked into how they intake and book inmates, they realized the current design would not work.
He said the sheriff’s office, not the HOK architecture firm, was the one who initiated this redesign.
Mr. Bernard also told commissioners that this $100,000 is not a result of a change order, and rather comes from savings from already-appropriated funds.
He said, “We originally had what you appropriated, and had a change order that did not go before you that reduced the amount by $499,000, and we’re using this same fund to do this redesign.”
He again reiterated that the redesign would facilitate “better flow” of both intake and releases. He said because this redesign is occurring before construction has begun, that will keep costs lower.
“Had we been six or 10 months down the line, it would have cost much more because they would have been in the construction of it,” Mr. Bernard said. “We’re doing this earlier enough that KTM would not see any additional construction costs.“
Chief Deputy Austin Garrett emphasized the increased number of bookings Silverdale will see as the downtown jail is being phased out.
“We are now booking for every agency in this county, so that’s a huge volume,” the chief deputy said. “The flow the way it was would not have worked for us. It would have been chaos. If we had waited, it would have cost us a lot of money down the road.”
“Okay guys, so $100,000 for an office layout? that sounds pretty expensive to me,” Commissioner Boyd commented.