A new Penobscot County Jail will cost as much as $84.5 million to build, according to newly released documents.
The cost estimate, along with how many beds the facility will have, were among the new details in documents released by County Administrator Blair Tinkham Monday.
The jail will cost between $72.7 and $84.5 million, according to the plans. The building will have 258 beds.
Tinkham did not respond to requests for comment.
This is the second batch of details about the proposed jail released this month. The first showed floor and site plans for a facility in Hampden but had no information about the cost or capacity of the facility.
More beds were needed because the county is paying more than $2 million to board out more than 60 inmates a year, Penobscot County Commissioners Chair Andre Cushing said. The current facility holds 157 inmates.
While that means Penobscot County is responsible for 220 or 230 inmates, the county doesn’t want to build a facility that can only hold the current amount of inmates, Cushing said.
“There are ebbs and flows in when people get arrested, or how long that they’re in our care. You don’t want to build for just exactly the number you have, because then you’re bonding for something that maybe 10 years from now you’ll need to add another 20 or 25 more cells or jail beds to,” he said.
If the jail is built in the proposed location in Hampden, where commissioners have entered into a land option in an industrial park, county residents will vote to move the jail from Bangor in the June election, Cushing said.
Under state law, if the new facility were to be built in Bangor voters would not have to approve the location because it would remain in the county seat.
Over the last six years, the number of beds and cost for a facility have fluctuated, with the most recent plans that were shared featuring an eight-story, 250-bed jail. That jail would have cost around $70 million and had more than 116,000 square feet of space, according to plans released at the time.
The proposed building will have 109,000 square feet of space, the plans show.
The proposed costs are similar to what Penobscot County Commissioners Dan Tremble, Dave Marshall and Cushing have previously shared.
Other estimates surpassing $100 million were also discussed, but the range given for the current plans is “appealing” and based on other modular jails the design company, DCCM, have worked on before, Cushing said.
The modular design, which has two pods for cells and designated areas for intake, booking and medical services, lowered the proposed cost by using materials more efficiently, Cushing said.
Medical services being offered in the jail will lower its budget because officers won’t have to transport inmates to get care and watch over them at the hospital, Cushing said.
In one instance, officers spent 27 hours with an inmate receiving care at a local hospital, Cushing said. The county spent $27,000 in overtime to the officers because the care couldn’t be given in the jail, he said.
The two pods that hold inmates will have smaller areas, meaning the jail could employ fewer officers, Cushing said.
A new facility with more beds and cells will also allow the county to stop spending roughly $2 million on boarding and funds on maintenance, Cushing said.
“There’s a long term cost benefit to having a new facility that could redirect some of the money that taxpayers are already obligated to for boarding and associated incarceration costs,” he said.
Activists against building a new county jail have said funding for a new jail should be spent on diversion programs that would allow criminals to meet with case managers instead of spending time in jail. Doug Dunbar, a member of the “No Penobscot Jail Expansion” group, has previously said the proposed facility may cost more than double the amount released Monday.
People against a new facility may not understand what services the current jail can offer, Cushing said. For instance, a new facility would allow the county to work with local organizations, like Bangor Area Recovery Network, inside the jail to help inmates recover from mental health issues, he said.
“It’s sort of background noise to the seriousness of what we need to do, which is have a facility that can hold the numbers that we’re now boarding out, and that can do the programming that we don’t have space for,” Cushing said.
