County may soon act on long delayed bigger jail

Building a new jail or expanding the current one has been discussed by county officials for years, but the Commissioners Court may soon be forced to do more than just talk.

Problems with the aging Hood County Law Enforcement Center at 400 Deputy Larry Miller Dr. “are only going to get worse,” said Precinct 2 Commissioner Ron Cotton.

The county recently held an almost two-hour-long workshop on the subject called by Precinct 3 Commissioner Jack Wilson.

Discussions included enlisting help from AG/CM professionals to determine whether the building is even salvageable. The construction management and estimating firm has also been assisting the county in possible capital improvements to fire stations.

A proposal for an assessment of the LEC not to exceed $23,000 was on the agenda for the Tuesday, July 26 Commissioners Court meeting. The Hood County News went to press before the meeting was held.

According to County Judge Ron Massingill, Wilson and Cotton have taken the lead in figuring out what to do with the building, which he said was “built fast and cheap back in the day, and you can tell it.”

In addition to constantly being above capacity, with the Sheriff’s Office having to transport inmates to other counties, the building itself has so many issues that county Maintenance Director Jay Riley has assigned one of his employees there fulltime, Massingill said.

The judge noted a recent surprise jail inspection by the state as a cause for concern. Although the county passed that inspection, just as it has for the past 14 years, there will likely come a day when it won’t.

Captain Eric Turbeville, the jail’s administrator, warned of such at the workshop, citing overcrowding and the building’s poor condition as reasons.

“That really scared the hell out of me,” Massingill said of the inspection. “There are electrical problems and everything else, and you can’t get parts for a lot of that stuff, too, because the jail is so old.”

Built in 1995, the Hood County Jail has beds for 192 inmates, but there is a daily average of 225, Massingill said.

The county houses its overflow at jails in other counties, but Massingill and Sheriff Roger Deeds said that jails in surrounding counties are often full and unable to take inmates from Hood County.

Another problem is that Hood County’s jail has a limited amount of space for female inmates, and those numbers, too, are growing.

The cost of housing inmates at other facilities costs taxpayers about $50 per day, Massingill said.

However, there are other costs as well. Transporting inmates means increased fuel and vehicle maintenance costs, and deputies must spend time on the road driving them.

At the workshop, Wilson said that deputies have been forced to transport inmates to other jails since the year 2000 at a “tremendous cost to Hood County.”

Wilson stated that the yearly average cost of housing inmates elsewhere is almost $350,000 and that when ancillary costs related to transport are factored in, the cost is over $540,000.

Cotton said that building a new jail will cost about $800 per square foot and that refurbishing the current facility might cost about half that. However, both refurbishment and expansion would be needed.

“It’s just pretty obvious to some of us that we need to do something because the jail inmate count is not going to go down, it’s just going to get bigger as we’re growing,” the commissioner said. “We can’t keep kicking this can down the road.”