The 2020 consultant report on the jail included a rendering showing a seven-story tower that will replace the City County Building jail. The plan approved March 3 reduces the tower to six floors.
After some behind-the-scenes scrambling the Dane County Board of Supervisors has kept the $150 million jail consolidation project from completely derailing. At its March 3 meeting, the board voted 29-7 to approve borrowing an additional $16 million to construct a new six-story jail tower to replace the outdated and dangerous City County Building jail. Just two weeks ago, supporters of consolidating the county’s jail system thought they did not have the votes to borrow millions more for the project, whose costs have soared since its initial approval in 2019.
A last-minute compromise — announced just a day before the March 3 meeting — was able to convince supervisors on the fence to vote yes on the much-debated project. It was estimated the county needed an additional $24 million to complete the 2019 plan that would have built a seven-story jail tower to replace the City County Building jail and the minimum-security Ferris Center facility on Rimrock Road. The compromise has the potential to lower the total bed count in the jail system further than the 2019 plan, but the Ferris Center will remain open for use by the Sheriff's Office for the time being. That facility has been empty since the pandemic hit because the inmate population dropped significantly.
“People that were on the opposite sides two weeks ago are here together,” Supv. Carousel Bayrd, who was leaning towards voting no on borrowing more money for the jail project two weeks ago, said at the meeting. “This moves us forward, this is a compromise that everyone's satisfied with. I think it is good work.”
But not every supervisor was on board with the revised plan. Supv. Heidi Wegleitner 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 Weigleitner. “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?”
The resolution calls on the Sheriff’s Office to work on a plan to end the Huber work-release program, which has been run out of the Ferris Center, by 2025. However, that decision would ultimately need to be made by Sheriff Kalvin Barrett, who said at the meeting he couldn’t commit to the plan.
“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.”
The debate over what to do about Dane County’s jail has been going on for decades. When the Public Safety Building opened in 1993, the facility solved a long-standing overcrowding issue at the much older jail located on the sixth and seventh floors of the City County Building. But conditions at the older jail continued to deteriorate and when Dave Mahoney was elected sheriff in 2006 he started sounding the alarm on the need to replace the “Alcatraz-style” City County Building jail built in the 1950s. During his 15-year tenure as sheriff, Mahoney repeatedly called the City County Building jail “dangerous and inhumane” and 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. 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 — despite being purportedly designed to do so when first built. So, another $186,000 was spent revising the plan. In April 2019, consultants provided four additional options to accomplish the same goals as the project approved in 2017. 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 for that version of the jail consolidation project in June 2019. It was supposed to be completed by 2024.
But then the pandemic hit in March 2020 and since then both inflation and construction costs have increased substantially. This realization and the nationwide protests after the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 revived the debate on whether the county and other stakeholders really need a jail system with 922 beds. The latest plan will almost certainly not be the last vote the county board will take before construction on the new jail tower begins. County staff told the board that new design plans will be needed and the final cost estimate for the project may rise again.
Mahoney, who retired in 2021, testified at the meeting that the latest plan for the jail 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.”
