The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Location adjacent to county rodeo grounds
The county has found a place to build a new jail facility. The county has paid approximately $155,000 for a lot near the Gunnison Rodeo Grounds with the intention of building a new detention facility on the site.
The Board of County Commissioners recently approved the purchase for the property where a jail could be built on a nearly 80,000-square-foot lot adjacent to the county’s rodeo grounds, bordering 14th Street and Bidwell Avenue in Gunnison.
County manager Matthew Birnie told the commissioners at a work session last month that he had signed a contract to purchase a piece of property in what is now a vacant lot, to round out the county’s two other holdings in the area.
The area is entirely within an area that is zoned for industrial uses by the city of Gunnison, which would allow for a jail to be built, Birnie said.
“It’s not a discussion of whether or not the county should have a jail,” Birnie said. “We have a statutory requirement to have a jail. It’s not a conversation about the adequacy of the current jail, because there are 20 years of studies showing that the jail facility is deficient in several areas.”
Other than not meeting standards that the county is required to meet, Birnie said, “There’s a moral issue as to the conditions in which we ask people to work and the conditions in which we confine people who have broken the law. Punishment doesn’t include a gulag in this country anymore.”
After two failed attempts to get voter support of a tax measure that would raise funds for a retrofitting of the courthouse to house a modern jail, with the most recent attempt failing in 2006, the county began looking at other locations to build a new facility with funding sources other than taxpayers.
The Jail Site Selection Committee that was instrumental in formulating the plan that failed in 2006 was also called on in July to consult with Birnie on the new selected site and the determination was that the new site would have a footprint nearly twice as large as the area needed.
Because of the extra space, there has been talk of moving the emergency operations center, the communications center and the sheriff’s offices to the new facility.
Previously, part of the concern with building a jail separate from the courthouse was with the transportation costs incurred by the county by shuttling inmates to court, when the current jail and the court rooms are in the same building.
“The concerns were primarily about transportation to court,” Birnie said. “Not looking at the advent of new technologies in criminal justice, this project not being a new court facility left people wondering about the need for transportation and the associated costs.”
But the system described at the meeting by Birnie, and endorsed by sheriff Rick Murdie, was that of video court appearances that would allow an inmate to remain at the jail while he or she attended a court proceeding via videoconference.
Birnie said that while the system had originally encountered resistance in other parts of the country, he had personally seen it save a district “hundreds of thousands of dollars in transportation costs.”
Murdie also said the resistance to the program from judges around the state is also waning—they are seeing the advantages of video appearances. Commissioner Hap Channell said Gunnison district judge Steven Patrick was showing favor toward the program.
With the transportation issue dealt with, the commissioners felt confident that the location identified by Birnie was the best place for the jail, which now has a completion date of 2014 in the county’s Strategic Plan.
However several residents of the neighborhood where the proposed jail would go attended the meeting to express their concerns about traffic, noise and the effects a jail would have on property values.
They were encouraged to be active in voicing their concerns throughout the design and development phase of the project, which could get its start shortly after the contract on the purchased piece of property is signed.
After that is done, the county will begin negotiations with the city of Gunnison to vacate a portion of 14th Street. The county will also begin looking at financing packages to fund the estimated $3.3 million project, according to the County’s Strategic Plan.
Once cooperation with the city and financing is secured, Birnie said, he would begin looking for an architect or design firm to start work on building drawings.
