The Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors moved forward Tuesday on a $25 million Main Jail rehabilitation project without knowing long-term plans for the site and despite multiple supervisors calling the facility “a money pit.”
On Tuesday, the supervisors voted 4-1 to support starting design for a major maintenance project for the aging Main Jail facilities at 4436 Calle Real, which reportedly will include “critical components” such as roof replacement, HVAC, plumbing and electrical work, and accessibility upgrades.
It also will include modifications required by the court-approved settlement of the class-action lawsuit against the county by Disability Rights California about jail conditions.
First District Supervisor Das Williams was the one dissenting vote.
County officials have called the Main Jail all sorts of names over the years, and Sheriff Bill Brown said it was “disgraceful, embarrassing and unacceptable for Santa Barbara County” in 2016 when he urged the supervisors to approve the construction contract for the new Northern Branch Jail near Santa Maria.
Part of the supervisors’ vote Tuesday included a consultant needs assessment of the county’s jail capacity projections, which also will evaluate the effect of local diversion programs.
The in-custody population dropped from a daily average of 850 to 950 people pre-pandemic to the 500-to-700 range during the pandemic, with 644 people in custody as of late October.
“Whether the jail population will, or should, continue at this lower census in the near term or longer- term future is unknown and subject to debate,” the County Executive Office wrote in the staff report for Tuesday’s agenda. “The Sheriff (Brown) has objected to permanently reducing the overall number of beds in the jail, concerned that future increases in jail population could lead to overcrowding again if rated beds are eliminated.”
Assistant County Executive Officer Jeff Frapwell said the design firm will consider the jail population projections and that the county will invest money only “in areas that continue to be needed into the future.”
The Main Jail rehabilitation plan will come back to the board for discussion before a construction contract is approved, he said. The funding would come from a Certificate of Participation debt issuance.
Frapwell also presented options for the Board of Supervisors to consider reducing the scope of work at the Main Jail and building the STAR (Sheriff’s Treatment and Re-Entry) Facility at the Northern Branch Jail site, or demolishing portions of the Main Jail campus and building new facilities, but they ultimately voted for moving forward with Main Jail rehabilitation.
Supervisors and county staff knew about the jail conditions when they decided to pursue the new Northern Branch Jail project near Santa Maria, which at 376 beds would be less than half the size of the South County jail facility.
Frapwell said Tuesday that the new jail has 344 rated beds (and 32 medical/mental health wing beds) and is expected to start operating in the first quarter of 2022. That is about three years past its original opening date.
With that $119.5 million facility about to start housing people in custody, the county is turning its attention to the rundown Main Jail facilities.
Concept Plans for Expanding South Coast Jail Facilities
The county’s long-term project concept for the Santa Barbara-area Main Jail site includes the millions of dollars in renovation work on aging buildings, which the Board of Supervisors has discussed, and building two brand-new jails on the site, which it has not.
The General Services Department put out a request for qualifications for design services and construction administration for the South County Main Jail facility earlier this year, and Noozhawk obtained the project scoping documents through a public records act request.
The documents include an itemized list of improvements (roofing, HVAC, solar replacement, control room upgrades and accessibility upgrades) with cost estimates split over multiple phases.
The “future” section includes project costs and timelines for demolishing the Medium Security Facility and building a new 270-bed jail for $36 million, and demolishing several wings of the Main Jail and building a 184-bed jail for $33 million.
Those proposed new jails plus the Northern Branch Jail would total 800 beds, plus the ones left usable in the Main Jail. The Main Jail near Santa Barbara currently has a rated bed capacity of 852 beds, Frapwell said.
The 2019 cost estimate for the Main Jail renovations plus demolition and building new jail facilities at the Santa Barbara-area campus was $91 million, according to the RFQ documents.
The Northern Branch Jail near Santa Maria cost an estimated $119.5 million, including $80 million in state grant funding.
The concept plans for two new jails in South County were not specifically discussed at Tuesday’s meeting.
Frapwell mentioned the option to demolish areas and construct a new housing unit at the Main Jail campus, and a few supervisors seemed to support the idea conceptually.
First District Supervisor Das Williams was concerned about the Main Jail’s maintenance costs and called the facility a money pit.
He was the only vote against design plans for renovations, saying the county needs more information about its long-term custody capacity needs first.
“So, we’re being asked today to pursue a path that is an unknown amount of millions more, and I hope we would ask for better information than that,” Williams said.
He wanted to reduce the amount of renovation work and build new direct supervision units — which require less staffing and provide more movement for people in custody — even if it means reducing the overall number of rated in-custody beds in the county.
“This is 30 years of neglect, right, and you can’t fix it in a year,” Fifth District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino said.
“We did what I think was prudent, which was to build a new facility,” he said, even though it is increasing the county’s operational costs. The Northern Branch Jail is expected to cost $20.4 million per year.
“That’s why I will always have preferred to have one large North County facility and a small booking station with, you know, a very downsized footprint in Santa Barbara. The sheriff has rejected that idea, and that’s his call,” Lavagnino said.
“That facility down there is a money pit, and it has been for 20 years and it’s not going to get better, you’re right,” he said to Williams.
“The only easy way out of this is to build a new facility,” which isn’t easy because the county doesn’t have the money, Lavagnino said. “We are barely affording the one we just built.”
He wondered aloud if it was a mistake not to build the Sheriff’s Treatment and Re-entry (STAR) Facility with state money when the county had the chance. Supervisors balked at the $2 million annual operating cost for the 228-bed facility in 2015.
That cost pales in comparison to the estimated $20.4 million annual cost of operating the 346-bed Northern Branch Jail.
“At a time when the state was going to match and provide us all the construction costs, we decided at the time not to do that and now we’re looking back and saying gosh, wish we had those,” Lavagnino said. “You know what probably would have been the best thing? To have that (Alisal) fire move a little bit in a different direction, get all our inmates out, and let that thing burn down and start over again. But that didn’t happen.”
Jail Population Declines with COVID-19 Pandemic, Diversion Programs
The Main Jail in the Santa Barbara area exceeded its rated bed capacity from 2015 until March 2020, when COVID-19-era restrictions reduced the number of people in custody.
The pre-pandemic in-custody population included thousands of people with small bail amounts and pending misdemeanor charges waiting for trial or sentencing.
The pandemic-era custody reductions had the most impact among people sentenced for felony crimes and non-sentenced people accused of misdemeanor crimes, which lines up with policy decisions.
In 2019 and the first five months of 2020, about 30% of people in jail were being held on bail of less than $10,000, according to the custody records Noozhawk obtained through a records act request.
Second District Supervisor Gregg Hart said policy decisions during the pandemic have reduced the in-custody population, as have diversion programs and changes to the bail system.
“We need better interventions that show better results and save taxpayers money, because the cost of funding the county’s criminal justice departments costs nearly 25% of the county’s operating budget. These costs are the elephant in the room,” Hart said.
Other supervisors joined him in voicing support for programs that divert low-level offenders and people with mental illness from jail custody.
During public comment, several people — including members of the League of Women Voters, NAMI, CLUE (Clergy & Laity United for Economic Justice), Santa Barbara Defenders and Families Act! — spoke in support of community-based programs and reducing incarceration in Santa Barbara County.
“Less incarceration, we believe, will not only reduce recidivism and crime rates generally, but it will put a literally concrete limit on our shamefully disproportionate record of locking up the poor and disempowered,” said Bill Mackler, a defense attorney with the Santa Barbara Defenders group.
In more than 30 years as a defense attorney, he said, “I’ve never seen a jail other than during a pandemic run under capacity; it’s just not a thing.”
The county should evaluate its in-custody capacity needs before moving forward with jail renovation work, he said.
Lynne Gibbs of NAMI Santa Barbara County said a Behavioral Wellness annual jail snapshot report shows that at any given time, 56% to 60% of people in custody have been BeWell clients at one point, while only 5% of them were being served at the time they were arrested.
“That’s a serious gap in treatment,” she said, asking the county to focus more on diverting people with mental illness to community-based treatment, not incarceration.
— Noozhawk managing editor Giana Magnoli can be reached at gmagnoli@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
Status Report on Collaborative Criminal Justice Efforts & Main Jail Rehabilitation Project