Sullivan Panel OKs Spending for Jail
Funds to add space for more beds and to fix leaky roof to come from leftover bond proceeds
The Sullivan County Commission’s Building Committee has approved spending $250,000 in leftover bond funds to add space for 30 more inmate beds at the county jail and another $100,000 to fix a leaky roof there.
“The money’s there. I think we ought to do it,” Commissioner Ralph Harr of Bristol said before making a motion to authorize the project.
The money comes from $481,000 in leftover bond proceeds issued and earmarked for public buildings – the same bonds that funded most of a recent $6.2 million jail expansion and provided a more than $200,000 local match for the $1 million restoration of the historic Deery Inn.
The committee unanimously opted, by a 7-0 vote with one absent, for the 30-bed expansion in the main jail rather than make repairs and renovations to the old jail annex, which Sheriff Wayne Anderson closed recently after two inmates escaped from that minimum-security area.
Committee Chairman Eddie Williams and county buildings overseer Claude Smith said 16 new spaces would be made from space currently serving as the salley port — the area where inmates are driven into and out of the jail – and that the other 14 spaces would be added to existing cells.
Smith said an outside area near the booking room would be used as a salley port until the next expansion phase of the jail, a project estimated to cost more than $9 million and include a new salley port.
Smith said the project should take about six months to complete and that bunks and plumbing fixtures from the annex would be used in the spaces for 30 additional inmates.
However, Williams and Harr said the project was a temporary fix and that the jail quickly could become overcrowded if Tennessee continues to leave state inmates – those convicted on state sentences — in the county jail rather than shift them to state prisons.
State corrections officials have indicated the state will need 7,000 new prison beds in the next five years – a need Williams and Commissioner Wayne McConnell of Kingsport said they feared would be shifted back to the county even though the county has no contract to house state prisoners.
“We’re dependent on what the state does,” Williams said. “The state makes you keep the prisoners and tells you how to keep them.”
The current rated capacity of the county jail is 353, but it would increase to 383 with the changes the committee approved. Smith said the jail this week had 358 inmates.
Officials said the roofing project was needed to replace an aging rubber membrane roof covered with gravel.
