They Acknowledge: NEW CITY JAIL MORE EXPENSIVE Than Using County Jail

Puyallup’s police chief recently shared that our city never did a feasibility study comparing the cost of running our city jail to the cost of booking inmates into our county jail, and suggested it would be “a wash.” Now one city council member has tried to respond to our research demonstrating $1 million in savings if we use our county jail, savings every other town in Pierce County has already realized by shutting down their city jails.

The council member claims that our finance director did a “study” showing it would cost 25% more to place misdemeanor inmates into our county jail than it costs to run our current jail. However, the council member provided no evidence of the so-called “study” or how the 25% figure was reached. We assume the council member actually meant that our finance director calculated a few numbers provided by our police department, whereas real feasibility studies are done by independent researchers with no agenda or conflicts of interest.

Accidental Admission

What the council member accidentally did in suggesting the 25% figure is admit that it’s actually more expensive to build and run a new city jail than it would be to contract with our county jail. Since our jail costs at least $2.1 million/year (plus liability insurance and losses for claims) to operate, and the cost of a building a new jail will be an additional $1.1 million/year to finance over 30 years, that’s of course 50% more than current costs.

The council member also claims, again with no proof, that the liability of using our county jail is greater than running our own jail. The opposite is of course the case, since any liability for claims would be spread between the city and county, rather than Puyallup taking on all liability by running its own jail. The council member also suggests Puyallup shouldn’t use the Nisqually Jail for liability reasons, again without evidence and despite the fact that many other cities insure use of the Nisqually Jail.

Compare our city’s lack of feasibility research to Olympia, where earlier this year, its police chief stood up in front of its council and presented a real 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.

The council member goes on in his op-ed to spread fears that our county jail won’t take misdemeanor inmates, and that our police officers would be gone from Puyallup to transport misdemeanor inmates to our county jail all of 8 miles away. That’s not how it’s done – corrections transport officers are hired to do that in surrounding towns, whether employed full-time or part-time by a city, or using county transport officers for fee. Our New County Jail was built to take misdemeanor inmates in expectation of old expensive city jails closing: the county wants misdemeanor inmates because it supports the county budget (click and read top of page 2).

No, and…

Can you imagine what our police department could do with an extra $1 million/year freed up in its budget? For one, that would pay for a councilmanic bond to build a new police station. We will detail this path forward in our final blog post next week. In the meantime, we encourage you to vote a resounding “no” on Proposition 1 and tell the Puyallup City Council to simply build new police facilities while using our county jail for misdemeanor inmates.

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