A couple of dozen people — including officeholders and members of the public — turned out Friday morning to hear the report of jail consultant Bill Garnos, who said, in a nutshell, that the county could need more than twice its current number of jail beds over the next 20 years.
Commissioners hired Garnos in October at a not to exceed cost of $7,860 to conduct a full review of past jail studies, obtain and crunch the current statistics and project future inmate populations and capacity needs. Built in 1998 with about 150 beds, the Platte County Detention Center currently has 180 beds. Populations have fluctuated for years, but have been trending upward, raising concerns for several years.
Including detainees the county houses for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Garnos reported the jail's average daily population (ADP) ranges from 175-215 inmates. The average is 193 inmates in the 180-bed facility.
In his conclusions delivered Friday, Dec. 21 at the Platte County Administration Center, Garnos estimated that within five years the county would need 237 jail beds to support an ADP of 202 state inmates (not including ICE); in 10 years, 283 beds to support an ADP of 241 state inmates; in 15 years, 330 beds to support an ADP of 280 state inmates; in 20 years, 376 beds to support an ADP of 319 state inmates.
Eliminating ICE inmates has been commonly suggested to alleviate overcrowding. According to Garnos' report, since altering the housing contract to keep ICE prisoners, the county has taken in about $1 million in extra revenue from ICE. The estimated ADP of ICE detainees is 18.
Presiding commissioner Ron Schieber said the decision made in 2016 to house ICE detainees was “purely a revenue-driven decision.” He said it was never intended to be a long-term arrangement and the contract with ICE could be altered or terminated at any time.
However, commissioners say removing ICE from the equation would simply delay the overcrowding issue for a couple of years.
The long-discussed build-out of the futures area — the basement of the current jail — would be another bandage effort, commissioners said Friday.
According to Garnos' report, the build-out of futures into a 52-bed facility would only delay the inevitable. The jail would still become overpopulated within two to five years.
First district commissioner Dagmar Wood — who was herself part of a jail study conducted in 2014 — said the estimated 18-24 months it could take to complete the futures area means the jail facility might already be full by the time it opened.
“Then we would need to run another jail facilities campaign while still working on the first jail campaign,” Wood said.
While he was hired to crunch the numbers, what the commission does with this information is not his decision, Garnos said.
“I'm not getting any more involved than I need to be about the futures area,” he said, as futures has been a hot topic for years. During the construction of the current jail in the mid 1990s, futures was expected to be just that – the future of the county jail when the need for expansion arose. However, subsequent changes in federal law have complicated matters because prisoner classifications have changed, as have legal requirements to separate prisoners dependent upon their crimes.
Some information is missing from the report, however, which raised some questions during the presentation. Crime and arrest statistics from the Kansas City Police Department are not broken down by county, Garnos said. He and Sheriff's Office officials have asked KCPD to provide crime stats for areas of Kansas City within Platte County, but have so far not received a response.
Garnos said while the inclusion of these numbers would drastically increase the crime rate in the county — by 200-300 percent, he said — he also insisted the numbers would not change the outcome of his report.
“It's nice to know, but not critical,” Garnos said, because the crime and arrest falls at the very beginning of the criminal justice process. Information such as charges filed and bookings into the county jail are more important, and were readily available.
Schieber said he would like to see the crime statistics for several reasons, and hopes the information can be included in Garnos' final report. That report, Garnos said, is complete, but he is waiting to give Kansas City more time to respond.
Additionally, waiting a few weeks could give Garnos time to include the last months of 2018 into his study. Currently, his calculations are based on data through September. He said after the first of the year he could include October, November and December data into the report at no additional charge.
“And if you argue over this for six months and come back and need the information to be updated, that would be easier to do now,” Garnos said.
This is a possible scenario, as talks about expanding the jail started in 2012 with a report by Captain Randall Pittman of the Sheriff's Office. In 2014, Goldberg Group Architects completed a study containing what is now concluded to be an inflated population growth estimate, based on development numbers from the Twin Creeks area along Highway 169. However, the study did recommend a 315 bed facility, at an estimated construction cost of $21 million.
Garnos said he based his population estimates on data from the Mid-America Regional Council (MARC), whose predictions director of planning and zoning Daniel Erickson said are usually right on track. In 2010, Platte County's population was 88,322 people. In 2017, MARC estimated the county's population at 101,187. More concrete numbers will be available after the 2020 census, but right now the county's estimated population by 2030 is 120,319.
While development in Twin Creeks will increase the population, the boom predicted in 2014 is unlikely and will be spread over Platte and Clay counties.
Garnos gave no opinions on the estimates commissioned by the county earlier this year. In August, Treanor submitted a preliminary design and cost estimate for a new jail facility and sheriff's office, located on current county property adjacent to the existing jail and administration center. The 330 bed facility outlined by Treanor was estimated to cost $43 million.
Copies of Garnos' public presentation and the audio of the meeting are available on the county website at co.platte.mo.us.