Lucas County faces quite a few obstacles — many of them financial — to get a much-needed new jail built here. But Lucas County is just one of 88 counties in Ohio and most of the smaller, more rural counties face challenges just as daunting, if not more so, to fund construction of new jails.
That’s what prompted a group of lawmakers in Columbus to craft a plan to help fund jail construction patterned on the state’s school-construction formula. That’s a good model, not just for Lucas County’s immediate problem, but for a state filled with county jails that are similarly too old, deteriorated, and dangerous to safely serve their communities.
As proposed, the plan would include jail funding in Ohio’s two-year capital budget process. The state’s Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction would be responsible to assess jail-funding requests from county commissioners and to determine the need, basic project costs, the amounts the state and county can contribute, and expected operating costs of a new facility once opened.
The Ohio Facilities Construction Commission would cooperate with ODRC to develop a funding formula to rank each county based on need. Factors to be considered include a county’s total property value and sales tax revenue, estimated size and cost of the jail needed, minimum required construction and design standards, and an on-site evaluation.
The state would match a certain percentage based on the same factors used in ranking, and those dollars would be designated only for construction costs.
Spending money to build jails is always a tough sell for local political leaders. But every community has an obligation to maintain facilities that are safe for prisoners, staff, and visitors. In Lucas County efforts to replace the dangerously outdated jail on Spielbusch Avenue have been complicated by difficulties in finding and agreeing upon a site for a new jail, along with the failure of a 2018 levy that would have funded it.
Sheriff Mike Navarre, who took office in January, doesn’t favor using a property or sales tax levy to fund a new jail and has instead begun tightening the sheriff’s office’s budget belt to help fund the eventual construction. No amount of budget cutting gets the county the roughly $185 million it will need for a new jail, though.
And that’s true around Ohio.
The state’s funding formula to support school construction projects helped districts around Ohio modernize and replace school buildings that were in terrible shape a generation ago. The same type of program can help the state’s 88 counties make sure they have a safe, modern facility to serve their jail needs too.
First Published March 11, 2021, 5:00 a.m.
