Mead Hunt
A 2020 rendering shows a seven-story jail tower, fronting W. Wilson St., that would replace the City County Building jail. The plan approved March 3 reduces the tower to six floors.
The effort to shut down the jail located on the top two floors of the City County Building dates back decades. Longtime Dane County board supervisor Dave Ripp was on the board in the early 1990s when it approved constructing the Public Safety Building to address overcrowding at the outdated jail. But, he told supervisors at a recent county board meeting, “We didn’t have the votes to do it right.”
“For just over $20 million we could have had people out of the [City County Building jail]. We didn’t do that.”
Instead, supervisors approved spending $19 million to build the Public Safety Building with just four floors and as a result the City County Building jail remained open. That decision has ended up costing the county tens of millions of dollars while at the same time subjecting inmates to what former Sheriff Dave Mahoney has repeatedly referred to as “inhumane and dangerous” conditions. The projected cost to replace the facility will be at least $164 million, not including future interest payments. The average household in Dane County will be taxed more than $50 a year for the next 20 years to pay for the new jail.
In 2019, the Dane County board approved a plan that called for building a eight-story jail tower to replace the City County Building jail and the Ferris Center facility on Rimrock Road. But due to rising construction costs and inflation it was estimated that another $24 million would be needed to keep the project on track, even after a remodel of the Public Safety Building was scrapped from the plan and the new tower was reduced to seven floors. As the price tag soared, support from supervisors for the plan ebbed and the project came close to completely derailing this year.
There were reasons other than cost that a new jail facility seemed to be on life support, including a nationwide reexamination of the criminal justice system following the police killing of George Floyd and the reluctance to spend more money housing inmates that are disproportionately people of color. Efforts had already been put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic to radically reduce the jail population and some supervisors wanted to keep it that way. Even former supporters of the jail project were now questioning whether the county needed the 922 beds called for in the 2019 plan — even though that is 93 fewer beds than what the current jail facilities provide. There was also frustration — as several supervisors told Isthmus off the record — that Sheriff Kalvin Barrett was unwilling to discuss ways to further scale back the project.
As a result, a vote on whether to approve borrowing an additional $24 million at the board’s Feb. 17 meeting was delayed by two weeks so that supervisors could try to work out a new plan.
After some behind-the-scenes scrambling a compromise was drafted and on March 3 the board voted 29-7 to approve borrowing an additional $16 million to construct a new six-story jail tower to replace the City County Building jail. This brings the amount of borrowing needed for the project to $164 million. In addition to eliminating one floor from the jail tower, the compromise will keep the Ferris Center open for the time being. However, the resolution calls on the Sheriff’s Office to work on a plan to end the Huber work-release program by 2025, which has been run out of the Ferris Center. If that happens, the total number of beds in the county jail system could fall to 825.
Supv. Carousel Bayrd was initially opposed to borrowing more money for the jail but voted for the compromise plan. “People that were on the opposite sides two weeks ago are here together,” she said at the March 3 board meeting. “This moves us forward, this is a compromise that everyone’s satisfied with. I think it is good work.”
But Supv. Heidi Wegleitner, one of the seven supervisors who voted against the compromise, called the resolution “hasty” and “not good government.”
“We need to be wise with our spending. We don’t want to just be coming back and authorizing more borrowing,” said Wegleitner. “Can we figure out what the actual plan is, what the contract changes are going to be, and how much it’s going to cost?”
Carolyn Fath
A segregation cell at the jail in the City County Building.
Dane County Executive Joe Parisi has long been lukewarm to devoting more resources to the jail project and in November called on the county board to put the issue before voters in a referendum. But he tells Isthmus he will sign off on the additional $16 million of borrowing. “It’s good to see that folks are willing to give a little bit on each side and come up with something that can continue to move forward,” says Parisi. “But it’s my hope that this [$164 million] will be it in terms of cost. Supervisors need to be committed to sticking to this budget. My priorities have always been shutting down the City County Building jail and having adequate mental health support. I believe we can do this with the amount that is currently budgeted.”
Sheriff Kalvin Barrett is also supportive, telling supervisors at the March 3 meeting that he was willing to go along with the plan to build the smaller, six-story jail tower and decide at a later date what to do with the minimum-security Ferris Center facility.
“Our ultimate goal in anything we do is to send our justice-involved individuals back to the community better — not broken or bitter. And that’s what a consolidated facility will allow us to do,” he said.
The Ferris Center, which has 144 beds, has been empty since the pandemic hit. It is some supervisors’ hope, as expressed in non-binding terms in the latest jail project resolution, that the Huber work-release program will ultimately be reimagined and run by the county’s human services department. Barrett wouldn’t commit to that plan but he didn’t dismiss it, either.
“At this moment, there’s not enough information provided to make an educated decision either way,” Barrett told supervisors. “I’m committing to continuing those good faith conversations and understanding where we can find new and innovative ways to continue criminal justice reform in Dane County.”
During a Feb. 21 interview, Barrett told Isthmus that the capacity parameters in the 2019 plan were “sustainable for whatever may come up in the future.”
“Anything below 922 beds would go against the years of evidence-based research. I don’t want to be put in a position where we have a facility that is too small and would force us to either keep the City County Building open or ship residents out of the county. That would cost us millions of dollars a year in order to house people in a safe and humane facility.”
He also said that the jail population is likely to grow as the court system resumes trials delayed by the pandemic.
“We can’t forget the fact that our court system was basically on pause for 18 months. It just picked back up with trials at the beginning of 2022,” says Barrett. “There is a backlog of almost 10,000 open cases. So with that, as the process goes through, if someone is found convicted of a crime they’re going to be sentenced to a certain amount of time in custody. And that’s going to bring an increase in our jail population that my office has no control over.”
When the Public Safety Building opened in 1993, the facility relieved overcrowding at the outdated jail in the City County Building. Just a few years later, both jails were routinely full. Year after year, the physical conditions at the older jail continued to worsen. When Dave Mahoney was elected sheriff in 2006 he renewed the call to replace the “Alcatraz-style” jail. During his 15-year tenure as sheriff, Mahoney often charged that the facility was in violation of the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.
In 2017, after more than a decade of debate and millions of dollars spent on studies, the county board approved $76 million for a plan that would have shuttered the City County Building jail for good. Even before the price tag dramatically increased, it was still the most expensive project in county history. The proposal called for consolidating jail operations downtown by adding four floors to the Public Safety Building and remodeling the existing jail in the same building. At the same time, more than $4 million was approved to improve conditions at the City County Building while the new facility was constructed.
But in October 2018, county officials learned the 30-year-old Public Safety Building couldn’t support four additional floors — even though it was purportedly built for that purpose. So, the county spent another $186,000 to revise the plan. In April 2019, consultants provided four additional options that would accomplish the goals of the 2017 plan, including adding medical facilities and closing the City County Building jail and the Ferris Center. The cheapest option — which was still $74 million more than the old plan — called for an eight-story tower to be built behind the Public Safety Building. That plan would have reduced the total number of beds in the jail system from 1,013 to 922. Supervisors approved $148 million to get the jail consolidation project back on track in June 2019. It was supposed to be completed by 2024.
Mahoney, who retired in 2021, testified at the March 3 meeting that the latest plan for a six-story jail tower isn’t ideal but it at least keeps the project on track.
“It will get us closer to what we need to create a humane and constitutional jail,” said Mahoney. “It will, for the first time ever, create medical housing so that we don’t have to place individuals in wheelchairs in solitary confinement cells.”
But there is no construction completion date yet for the project and the battle may not be over. A final design and final cost estimate still need to be determined so that the county can put the project out to bid. And Parisi says construction costs could continue to rise.
“Things have not stabilized with the economy. We obviously had the supply chain challenges that were brought about by the pandemic and inflation is an issue. Now with the war in Ukraine, there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the world,” says Parisi. “I have no idea how supervisors came up with the current estimate. So further compromise on the scale of the jail project may still be needed.”
Dane County Supv. Andrew Schauer believes the county board can keep the jail project to its budget.
“What the last month has shown me is that devoting more money for this project is going to be a tough sell but the need to shut down the City County Building jail is greater than ever,” says Schauer. “We also have a new board being elected in April that will need to approve change orders and other aspects of the project. So I’m pleased we were able to work together on this latest vote that required a three-fourths majority. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened.”
