Puyallup could save a million dollars every year using our county jail

If you present facts to the proponents of a new Puyallup jail, showing that our costs to incarcerate inmates would drop from over $2.1 million/year (plus insurance and losses) to around a million dollars, they pivot to fears that we won’t be able to book our inmates into our county jail – a jail we the taxpayers built and maintain for that purpose.

They will scare you with fallacies about other jurisdictions not booking offenders as much as we do. Anything to avoid admitting that the very thing keeping Puyallup from getting a new police station and focusing on solving and preventing crimes, is the albatross of our own, expensive jail.

A Simple, Effective System

We already bring all our felony inmates to the county jail. Here’s what would happen if instead of maintaining our misdemeanor jail – let alone going in debt to spend an additional $1.1 million/year for 30 years to build a new misdemeanor jail – we simply do what all other towns and cities have found is the cost-effective, efficient thing to do:

Police officer time on duty would not be impacted by this change. We would simply maintain a couple holding cells in our police station for misdemeanor offenders waiting to see a judge or waiting to be transported to our Pierce County jail. We would have a van outfitted for transporting inmates the 8 short miles to our county jail. We would have a couple of our current corrections staff on-call to transport and oversee inmates in holding cells. Our remaining corrections staff can transfer to higher paying jobs at our county jail if they prefer, filling a need for more staff there.

Proponents of our jail say it’s not that easy, when in fact, it is that easy and pretty much what Sumner, Lakewood, Orting and all the other towns and cities around us do. Proponents of our city jail say our Pierce County jail might not take our misdemeanor inmates, but it’s our jail and we are already paying for it through our property taxes: all it takes is setting up an inter-local agreement, something that’s done regularly for all sorts of jurisdictional business.

In fact, our county jail is seeking misdemeanor bookings because misdemeanor inmates subsidize the costs of our county jail: cities are responsible for misdemeanor inmates so we have to pay fees to book them in county jails. Our county executive details this reality in his 2022 budget (click at see top of Page 2). Our taxes built the county jail in 2003 for this eventuality, but it’s sitting largely unused, due in part to Puyallup running its own jail past its expiration date.

Police Chief Admits: No Feasibility Study Done

Wednesday night (10/18/23) in a “neighborhood meeting” called by our police department to promote the Public Safety Building, our police chief admitted that the city never did a feasibility study comparing the cost or efficiencies of running our own misdemeanor jail to a system of bringing our inmates to our county jail.

Compare this to Olympia, where earlier this year, the police chief stood up in front of city council and presented a feasibility study showing the simple cost of running their 60 year old jail (which is similar to ours) is $1.5 million more expensive than bringing their misdemeanor inmates to the Nisqually Jail which is 15 miles from their police department. That’s not even considering the cost of building a new jail which he said would be $90 million.

This oversight on the part of city council and staff of not doing a feasibility study is irresponsible, and a non-starter for any project, let alone something that would put us over $76 million in debt for 30 years. They are afraid to see what a feasibility study would show: that having our own jail wastes over a $1 million per year – and causes us to simultaneously waste untold dollars for our county jail to remain largely idle.

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