The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

“That bothers me. I’m just afraid there’s something not on the up-and-up about this,” said state Rep. Philip Pinion, D-Union City, one of several legislators who expressed skepticism about the idea at a meeting this month of the Correction Oversight Committee.

Department of Correction Commissioner George Little insisted that a move to let other architects bid to become the Bledsoe “design team,” which he supports, is a legitimate recognition of the need for “a new generation” of prisons in Tennessee rather than following a “cookie-cutter” approach.

But he backed away from directly asking the committee to approve such a change in plans at the recent meeting. Several legislators said they would have voted no if he had.

The proposed change will be back before the committee at an Aug. 21 meeting.

The prison construction projects will add almost 1,800 beds to the state prison system’s capacity. Little cautions that the increase will not be enough for the long run.

New laws passed during the 2007 legislative session will mean longer sentences for many convicts, including child rapists and those using guns in violent crimes. Little said that preliminary estimates are that the new laws will create the need for 1,000 new prison beds in 10 years.

Even before the new laws took effect, Little said, the projected need was for 1,500 new beds by 2017. Now it’s expected that the state will need a total of 2,500 new beds if the preliminary estimates are confirmed by a more detailed analysis this fall, he said.

Also this fall, Gov. Phil Bredesen is expected to appoint a special commission, authorized by the Legislature earlier this year, that will study the corrections system and eventually make recommendations on how to deal with the anticipated influx of new prisoners.

Options include alternatives to hard-time prisons, especially for those committing less serious offenses, Little said.

For now, however, the more immediate corrections challenge is bringing the Morgan County and Bledsoe County facilities into operation.

The Morgan County Regional Correctional Facility, after some delays and a dramatic increase from the initial cost estimate of $80 million, is on track and should be in full operation next year, Little said.

The first prisoners should move into a completed building this fall, he said. They will be minimum-security inmates who will work on landscaping for the rest of the prison grounds, Little said. When the new prison opens, the state will close the aging Brushy Mountain State Prison but still net an increase of 838 new beds.

The increase in construction costs mostly came from corresponding increases in the cost of concrete, steel, other building materials and fuel, he said.

The new Bledsoe prison, officially known as Southeastern Tennessee Regional Correctional Facility, is still in the initial stages of development with a projected completion date of late 2010 or early 2011.

That means it’s not too late to change plans, even though $1,871,975 has already been paid to the architects under the original design contract, Cope Associates of Knoxville and Kaatz Binkley Jones and Morris of Mount Juliet.

The design contract would be worth $4.6 million if carried to completion, said Lanny Cope, president of Cope Associates.

Another $348,352 has already been paid to Mark Golman Associates, an Atlanta-based consulting firm that recommended the change in design being embraced by state officials.

Little said new projections show that sticking to the original plans for Bledsoe would add at least $20 million to the latest estimated cost “based on very conservative figures.”

The latest estimate is $182 million, meaning the total would be pushed to $202 million. The original estimate when the project was announced in March 2004 was $102 million.

“So we hired a consultant for $350,000 to tell us we’re doing it the wrong way — now that we’ve got started — and we need to start over?” asked Rep. Mike Turner, D-Nashville, at this month’s committee meeting. “And the architects are doing a good job, but you want to replace them?”

That is basically correct, Little acknowledged, because the initial “cookie-cutter” designed failed to take some things into account, such as recent advances in security technology that should be incorporated into the plans, and the new facility’s proximity to an existing prison that must be kept secure while work is going on.

“We were going to take what we did in Morgan, drop it down to Bledsoe and do the same thing,” he said.

Unlike Morgan County, the Bledsoe project also involves a water treatment plant, linked to a new pipeline that will bring water from the Tennessee River to the area. There are also environmental problems associated with runoff from a dairy farm operated by the state prison industries program, TriCor.

“It is far more complex than anything this department has taken on,” said Little. “We learned a lot at Morgan County.”

The new approach, if the committee agrees, may also translate into more competitive bidding for the final construction project, he said, and allow faster completion. At Morgan County, only two companies bid on construction, with Ray Bell Construction the winner.

Rep. Bill Harmon, D-Dunlap, chairman of the Correction Oversight Committee, said he is not yet sold on the idea of changing plans for Bledsoe, though he believes perhaps $500,000 of the $1.8 million in work done by architects will apply to the new plan.

Harmon said the increased costs in materials also make much of the escalating expenses at Morgan and Bledsoe understandable.

“That’s happening in every construction job. There are astronomical increases in the cost of concrete, steel and fuel,” he said.

At the committee hearing, Pinion and some other legislators questioned whether the current architects were being treated fairly and whether criteria in the new bidding for architects would effectively exclude Tennessee companies and favor larger, out-of-state firms. Little said that would not be the case.

Cope said he was “reluctant to take any position” on the proposed change and is hopeful that, if the change takes place, “we will still be part of the team.”

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2007/jul/29/major-prison-projects/
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© 2007 Knoxville News Sentinel