Board defers jail expansion

At the Nov. 25 board of supervisors meeting, the Orange County Board of Supervisors deferred taking action to form a Central Virginia Regional Jail Authority and secure financing for a jail expansion.
According to District 5 Supervisor Lee Frame, who serves as the at-large member of the current jail board, the best way to fund a $10 million expansion to the jail is for the jail’s participating jurisdictions to form a jail authority. By doing so, Orange County, along with Fluvanna, Greene, Louisa, Madison, would each transfer their one-fifth ownership of the jail to the authority.
By creating the CVRJ Authority, participating counties would divest all powers, rights obligations and duties of the existing jail board; the authority would, in turn, assume all power and authority. Additionally, the jail authority would have the ability to issue its own bonds.
“With a jail authority, they’re much closer to having the ability to raise funds than we are as five individual counties,“ Frame said.
CVRJ Superintendent Glen Aylor addressed the board during a public hearing on the issue during last week’s meeting. According to Aylor, the need to expand the jail is dire.
“We look to run out of beds sometime in 2012,“ Aylor said.
But just running out of room isn’t the only problem facing the jail and the jurisdictions that participate in it.
“The obvious impact is that if an expansion is not done, your share [of financial responsibility] will continue to grow by leaps and bounds,“ CVRJ jail board attorney Ron Maupin said.
Since the facility was constructed, prisoners housed for federal offenses have offset the costs of housing locally charged criminals. But now, the equation has changed and there is no longer enough room at the CVRJ to house enough federally charged criminals to pay expenses for the five counties the jail serves.
What that means for participating jurisdictions, Aylor explained, is an ever-increasing cost to operate the jail. But by adding additional space, the jail will have increased capacity to continue housing federal prisoners in order to offset local costs.
Maupin explained that the Virginia General Assembly would be more likely to grant an exemption from the current moratorium on building jails if the project was headed up by a jail authority. And, Maupin added, it would be a far simpler process for an authority to secure funding.
But to do that, the CVRJ’s participating counties would each have to agree to a resolution to transfer control to the authority-and they’d have to act quickly. In order to qualify for reimbursement from the state for the expansion, the decision to form the jail authority must be made by mid-December to introduce the request before the current session of the General Assembly is over.
Maupin said without forming an authority, the likelihood of the General Assembly approving an exemption to the moratorium would be slim, based on discussions he’d had with state legislators.
Frame made a motion to accept a resolution transferring control to the jail authority, but the motion died for a lack of a second.
Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Mark Johnson said he was reluctant to cede control of the jail by forming an authority. But Johnson said he was more disturbed that the decision would have to be made on such short notice.
“I have a problem with 60 days out, being told ‘You have to do this or the sky’s going to fall,‘ “ Johnson said. “We need to make a decision based on if it’s the right decision.“
According to Maupin, the initial drafts of the resolution were distributed to participating counties’ local governments several months ago. The first drafts of the resolution were approved by the jail board in August. After that, a jail board committee made revisions, and following the committee’s revisions, the resolution was distributed to local governments, Maupin said.
“There’s no fault on the local government for not having processed something sooner-they’ve got a gazillion things on their plate,“ Maupin said. “It’s not one of those things where somebody didn’t do something they were supposed to do.“
Maupin added that the current jail board’s recommendation to form a jail authority came as a result of the economic forecast.
“It would have been nice to have been in this position eight or nine months ago but we just didn’t have the information at the time,“ Maupin said.
Fluvanna County and Greene County officials have already approved the resolution to form a jail authority. Louisa County is prepared to approve the resolution and Madison County officials will make a decision at their next meeting on Dec. 9, according to Maupin.
Orange County officials discussed making revisions to the resolution to form the jail authority, and will bring the issue up again at the Dec. 9 Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting.