At the August 21 Board of County Commissioner work session, local activist Mark Weiler was — once again — making the case for a smaller jail. He’d presented his concept on other occasions. (For example, here.)
Mr. Weiler’s basic concept is built around an affordable compromise — and a ‘pay-as-you-go’ mentality. Part of the conversation, between Mr. Weiler and the County staff, has centered upon the (generous?) savings accounts that the BOCC has managed to accumulate over the past decade. Millions of dollars that were stashed away, by the BOCC, for “a rainy day.”
How many millions of dollars? And is this “Jail Problem” the rainy day we were waiting for?
We’re here listening to County Finance Director Larry Walton, speaking on August 14:
“We have a TABOR reserve and there’s different ways to calculate it, and it’s like 3 percent [of the annual operating budget.]
“Then we have the Working Capital Reserve — basically, it’s to deal with the [revenue] fluctuations within the year. And if I look back in my permanent records in my finance office, I see where we were borrowing money [in the early 2000s] just to meet payroll and so on. It was a huge expense, and consumption of time that can easily be avoided.”
As the County dug itself out of near-bankruptcy — in the middle of the Great Recession — former Finance Director Diane Sorensen created the Working Capital Reserve to ensure the County could meet payroll and accounts payable, without constant short-term borrowing. That savings account amounts to about three months of operating expenses — about $2.5 million — we were told by Mr. Walton.
Then the Commissioner have a savings account they call their Strategic Reserve, to “mitigate the changes in the economy that happen over a longer period of time,” according to Mr. Walton. That savings account contains about $3.3 million.
Mr. Walton:
“There’s also an Unassigned Fund Balance. That’s about $3 million. That’s the only, you might say, ‘discretionary funds’ that exist.”
But Mr. Walton said he wouldn’t like to see the BOCC dipping deeply into the Unassigned Fund Balance, because that might mean they would soon have to dip into one of their other savings accounts “to maintain cash flow.”
Only one of the savings accounts Mr. Walton mentioned during this presentation is actually required by Colorado law; that’s the TABOR Reserve. Which means that the BOCC apparently has $8.8 million sitting in discretionary savings accounts, as of August 2018. That’s according to the discussion on August 14 with Mr. Walton.
But are we forgetting to mention the Justice System Capital Improvements? Last December, the BOCC included that line item in the 2018 Budget, as shown in this Powerpoint slide from one of Mr. Walton’s presentations last year.
It would appear that the BOCC may have an additional $2 million already set aside, especially for our struggling justice system buildings. Add that to the $8.8 million in the savings accounts, and we get a total of $10.8 million in available funds. If the BOCC wanted to use that money, for something very important.
Like a jail.
To put $10.8 million into perspective, the architect consultants who worked on last year’s Sheriff facilities plans — which ultimately failed at the polls — gave us the estimated cost of a fully ‘state-of-the-art’ 54-bed Detention Center that could be constructed on the vacant parcel next door to the existing County Courthouse and (abandoned) Sheriff’s Office:
Less than $7.2 million dollars, for a fancy new Detention Center?
Maybe I’m misreading these official County documents. Or maybe I just don’t understand numbers.
Or maybe our BOCC and their investment bankers are trying to take us to the cleaners.
This $7.2 million new jail is of course only an estimate by expert architects. But it appears that the BOCC already has, sitting in their savings accounts, enough money to build a new Detention Center — without asking the community to increase its sales tax for the next 15 years to pay off a newly-created $25 million debt. (Or is it $30 million?)
I understand that Sheriff Rich Valdez and Undersheriff Tonya Hamilton fully support the idea of a tax increase and the creation of a huge new debt to construct state-of-the-art facilities for their department. Public safety is their job — and locking people up and keeping them off the street, for whatever length of time, makes that job easier. It’s been a terrible inconvenience for the Sheriff and his staff to drive inmates back and forth from the La Plata County Jail, an hour each way. (Although it’s been a great savings to the taxpayers.)
But can’t we make some kind of compromise? Do our new Sheriff facilities need to be some of the most expensive, per square foot, in Colorado?
Mr. Weiler argues that we can, indeed, find a more affordable way to build a new jail, without a tax increase and without cutting other County services.
The inmate and arrest numbers provided by Undersheriff Hamilton seem to suggest that we can have a safe community without overflowing our jail (as we were doing in 2004 and 2005, under Sheriff Tom Richardson.)
It’s been hard for some folks to embrace the amazing technology of the 21st century. (I am, myself, just learning how to ‘text.’) That amazing technology has slowly made its way into the law enforcement profession — in the form of instantly-available data, for example, and also in the form of ‘body cams” that record video footage of events.
Ankle bracelets offer another amazing tool to the justice system. It’s now possible to track the movements of a person on parole, or a person awaiting trial, without physically locking them up. And without needing to spend taxpayer revenues to feed, house, clothe, supervise and provide medical treatment for each inmate. (Archuleta County was spending about $1 million a year on those sometimes-unnecessary expenditures, in 2014, before the jail flooded.)
It’s hard to embrace the future.
Even if you are a well-paid County Commissioner.