TOLEDO – Lucas County Commissioners resolved not to finance a new County Corrections Center on Tuesday, though Pete Gerken, Lucas County Commissioner, said it was something he had been pushing towards for the past decade.
“Today is heartbreaking for me,” he said, but added that “it is unwise, at this point, to incur 300 million dollars worth of debt in an uncertain economy where federal and state supports are being pulled away and being attacked.”
The Lucas County Management and Budget Director, John Wenzlick, presented the new jail project for the commissioners to discuss, and said the new facility would cost $273 million. Wenzlick said $54 million on the jail could be paid with cash and grants up front, but $219 million of the project would have to be financed over 35 years. Lucas County would pay a $15.7 million every year for the next 35 years, for a total cost of somewhere around $549.5 million, if the current new plan for the correctional facility went through.
“One of the biggest challenges that we have is the impacts that the debt service for 35 years will incur on future generations and Lucas County as a whole,” said Jessica M. Ford, the county administrator. “This is the largest project that the county will undertake if we decide to move forward.”
Touting the savings a new jail would offer and lamenting the ills of continuing with the current facility downtown, Lisa Sobecki, Lucas County Commissioner, made convincing arguments for the new correctional facility.
“Without a new facility, our sheriff will be unable to implement the best practices in inmate management that we all know are safer and more cost effective,” she said. “This facility is old. Its systems are failing, and we cannot continue to live along with Band-Aid solutions.”
Then Sobecki reminded those in attendance that the people who enter the jail could very well be innocent and guilty of no wrongdoing.
But ultimately, the financial mountain of debt the new project would potentially incur was too great for any of the commissioners to fully embrace.
“Right now, we’re operating in a deficit,” said Lucas County Commissioner Anita Lopez. “We are still operating in a deficit. So for us to again spend when our revenue is going flat and our population is decreasing, that means we’re going to have to make significant cuts.”
“Cuts,” she elaborated, could be extended to county staff, and she anguished over the thought of letting go of county employees in this job market in order to build a jail.
After considering the matter, Sobecki said, “We can and we should do better with the current conditions in our pre-trial detention facilities. I’m going to ask…that we embark on a plan to assess what it will take to rehabilitate and look at the current jail that we have to make it better than what it is.”
Following the commissioners’ meeting, Gerken said he grieved not having a new jail, but resolved to work in the new direction of improving the current Lucas County Corrections facility.
