CEDAR CITY — Local officials discussed plans for a new Iron County Jail during a special town hall meeting in Cedar City on Tuesday night.

The two-hour meeting attracted approximately 300 people to the Great Hall inside the Hunter Conference Center on the Southern Utah University campus.

“This is the first informational meeting, and we are not set in stone,” Iron County Commissioner Mike Bleak said as he welcomed those in attendance. 

“We haven’t got a plan in concrete. We don’t have a site in concrete,” he added.

Bleak also noted that the County Commission has been discussing the need for a new jail for at least the past four years, including setting aside money as a line item in the county’s annual budget.

During the first half of the meeting, three county officials each took approximately 15 minutes going over a different aspect of the issue.

First, Iron County Sheriff’s Lt. Shalon Shaver, the jail commander, spoke of the history of the existing Iron County Correctional Facility, which was built in 1987. In addition to currently operating at near-capacity with over 180 inmates and little or no extra space, the building is fraught with numerous infrastructure problems, including leaky pipes, corroded wiring and cracked walls, she said.

Shaver identified the jail’s greatest needs as being a more efficient layout, more space for female inmates and on-site medical and mental health treatment facilities.

County auditor Dan Jessen then took the stage to address the two main questions of “How big?” and “How much?”

Answering those questions, he said, requires analyzing both the average incarceration rate and population growth estimates.

Jessen noted that Iron County’s population has already tripled over the past 40 years and is expected to more than double in the next 40.

“We’re projecting that Iron County will grow on average at an annual growth rate of about 2.6%,” he said. “Over the next 40 years, that means that we will more than double in size, during the time that this new facility has to serve the county’s needs.”

Jessen explained that a phased approach would allow for one modular pod to be built initially, with room for future expansion at the same location.

“What we’re talking about is building one pod facility now, which will handle our needs for approximately the next 25 to 30 years,” Jessen said, noting that a second pod could then be built as needed.

Jessen also talked about how housing non-county inmates helps the jail cover its costs, due to the per diem amounts that are paid by the state and federal governments, currently $61.03 per day for state inmates and $70 for federal.

He likened the situation to a carpool, where a driver who has to commute to work every day can save money if he gives a ride to one or more passengers and they help pay for gas.

“You still have to go to work – none of that changed,” he said, making an inference to the underlying operating expenses. “But now you’re able to share some of that cost.”

Nearly one-third of the current jail’s operating budget comes from reimbursements for state and federal contract inmates, he said. 

“Right now, with the limited contract inmates that we have, and this is shrinking all the time as we get more county inmates, we’re receiving about $1.5 million in revenue … that helps cover our $5.5 million operating costs,” he said.

“If that revenue were to go away tomorrow, they would have an unbalanced budget,” he added. “So it’s far from making money, but if we could fill those extra beds … that’s kind of why that’s the county’s approach.”

Jessen also mentioned neighboring Beaver County’s massive correctional facility, which almost exclusively houses state contract inmates; that facility, Jessen said, generates $5.5 million to $6 million in annual revenue, more than enough to cover its own operating costs and those of its Sheriff’s Office.

However, Jessen said building such a large facility doesn’t appear to be an option for Iron County.

“Now, those contracts aren’t available. We’ve talked to the state, we’ve talked to the feds … they say we’ll give you as many as we can, but the state says we’re standing pat, so that that’s really not an option for us at this point to build a bigger facility,” he said. “So we’re going to build what Iron County needs and fill in the excess space.”

The third county official to speak was county planner Reed Erickson, who talked about the four primary locations that are under consideration.

For the sake of convenience, the four sites were nicknamed Landfill, Smead, Automall and Enoch, after their geographic locations and/or nearby landmarks (see map below for reference).

Erickson showed a comparative table wherein each of the four sites had been evaluated on several criteria and given a score ranging from minus 3 to plus 3 for each of the factors.

Using that set of criteria, Automall and Smead were the two highest-ranked locations, with 13 total points for Automall and 12 for Smead.

Meanwhile, the Enoch site broke even with zero points, while the Landfill site scored minus 7. Both of those sites ranked low in proximity, due to them being farther from medical facilities, court buildings and law enforcement offices. 

“We transport prisoners up and down Main Street in vans right now to take them to court,” Jessen had noted earlier. “So if we can incentivize the courts to co-locate with us, we can cut way down on our transportation costs and we can increase safety. In order to do that, we need to be as close to town as possible.”

The Landfill site did rank highest in one area, as the county already owns the property, whereas it would have to purchase the land for any of the other three, Erickson noted.

The acreages of the four prospective properties are all roughly equivalent, so size of the site was not used as part of the evaluation, Erickson said.

“We’re looking at 30- to 40-acre pieces of property that are all large enough to accommodate both what we expect to build to start with, and then future growth,” he said.

Erickson said the hardest issue to address has been NIMBY, or the tendency of people to say “not in my backyard.”

“But what we found in research and empirical evidence by our own correctional facility, is that it’s really a non-factor in terms of safety in the neighborhood and property values in the neighborhood,” Erickson said. “We haven’t been able to see in any comparative research where it’s been an adverse effect on neighbors safety-wise.”

Panel discussion

Following Erickson’s remarks, several officials then took the stage for a panel discussion moderated by Mary Weaver Bennett, director of SUU’s Leavitt Center for Politics and Public Service.

The six panelists were Bleak, Iron County Sheriff Ken Carpenter, Cedar City Police Chief Darin Adams, Brian Head Town Marshal Dan Benson, Cedar City Council member Tyler Melling, and Rob Cottle of Babcock Design, an architectural firm that has been involved in designing multiple jail facilities.

The panelists first addressed several questions that had been submitted via email in advance of the meeting, then opened it up to live questions from the audience for another 20 minutes or so.

Some of the topics addressed included inmate visitation procedures, outdoor lighting and other aesthetics, what to do with the existing jail property, infrastructure availability and costs, staffing issues, mental and physical health treatment and the security of outdoor areas within the jail compound.

In response to a question about safety, Cottle said the No. 1 criteria for all jail designs comes down to the safety of both the officers and the inmates.

“The way jails operate, as you saw in some of the diagrams, it’s very much about how you control the flow of people and control the different groups of people within the jail,” he added.

Carpenter was also asked directly which of the four sites he would personally choose if it were up to him.

“Quite frankly, right now, with everything that I know, the Automall would be the best for us right now, because of soil studies, because of the location to the interchanges, because of the location to the hospital and the courts,” the sheriff answered. 

Addressing concerns about possible adverse economic impact on the north end of town, which is not far from the existing jail, Carpenter added, “The mayor and I have had these conversations, and he’s extremely concerned about the development of other businesses. But as I’ve talked with people that are involved in development and retail, they are very optimistic that if we started turning over soil there, that would increase the value of that property and then things would go in.”

Bleak said that he and the other commissioners are aware of the various drawbacks and concerns associated with each of the sites.

“We know that we are not going to find the perfect site that everybody just falls in love with,” he said. “We know that there are their concerns, and there’s going to be pushback from every site. And, we understand that we have to base our decisions on what’s best for Iron County for what’s best for all 60,000 residents of Iron County. That’s what our responsibility is.” 

Bleak said the issue has been a particularly difficult one for him.

“I’ve lost sleep about this. I’ll continue to lose sleep about this,” he said. “I’m going to do my very best to make the best decision and the right decision, because it’s the right thing to do. And we can’t kick it down the road anymore.

A recording of Tuesday night’s town hall meeting is available to watch on YouTube.

Bleak said there will be two upcoming opportunities for members of the public to comment about the issue: during an open house and public hearing scheduled for Feb. 22 at 5 p.m. in the Festival Hall’s upper conference room in Cedar City, and a public hearing during the county commission’s regularly scheduled meeting in Parowan on March 14, starting at 10 a.m.

Members of the public are also invited to submit written comments or questions to [email protected].

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