The Deschutes County jail expansion has been the source of growing tensions recently between County Commissioner Mike Daly and Sheriff Larry Blanton.

Daly has pushed since February to visit a county jail in the small southwestern Utah city of Beaver, where he says the county could find ideas to cut costs on construction and staffing.

But the sheriff says Daly is meddling with the project.

“I’d appreciate if you’d quit calling me out in public and quit criticizing jail operations in public,” Blanton said to Daly on Monday.

The two other county commissioners say the trip is unnecessary, and calculations by the county administrator suggest construction savings may not exist.

Daly and Blanton serve in elected positions. Daly is running for re-election and faces Republican Judy Duncan in the May 20 primary. Blanton, who was appointed to his post, is running unopposed.

Built in 1994, the Deschutes County jail began reaching capacity within a decade, and county officials began studying its expansion. In 2006, a consulting group hired by the county recommended adding beds and staff.

Beaver County, Utah, expanded its jail in 2006, adding nearly 200 beds, about 50 fewer than Deschutes County plans, Daly said.

He points out that the Beaver County jail came at a much lower price: $8 million, versus a rough estimate of $40 million in Deschutes County.

Daly also said the Beaver County jail operates with fewer staff than Deschutes County’s jail, and a visit could yield some ideas for reducing staff here.

This implication has irked the sheriff, who says it is his job to oversee the jail’s philosophy and approach to corrections.

Staffing needs and philosophy vary at different correctional facilities, Blanton said, and a consultant hired by the Sheriff’s Office several years ago recommended adding staff.

If Daly prevails, he, Blanton and five others — county staff and officials, the architect and a construction liaison — will visit the Beaver County jail May 27-29.

A Utah trip?

Daly’s interest in the southwestern Utah jail began after he met Beaver County Commissioner Chad Johnson earlier this year at a National Association of Counties event.

The cost of the proposed trip to Utah — estimated at $5,820 for airfare, travel, lodging and food — is small, Daly said, compared with the estimated cost of the jail expansion.

But county staff and officials have questioned the need to go to Utah to find a comparable project.

Commissioners Dennis Luke and Tammy Melton, along with County Administrator Dave Kanner, also have questioned the need for the trip and even suggested Daly is micromanaging the process.

“To me, a trip to that particular jail is a waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Luke, who said he will not go. “It takes too long to get there, and it’s not even close to the kind of facility we want to build. The only reason we’re going is because one commissioner wants to go.”

Melton said Monday that she will not go, either. Her job is to set policy, she said, not to determine the type of staffing at the jail.

“If there’s one thing we need to provide to the community, it’s public safety,” Melton said. “I don’t want to do it Utah-style because it’s cheaper. It’s not our process to micromanage.”

Kanner said he’s seen more involvement in the jail expansion than he experienced in his previous job as deputy administrator of Jackson County.

“I would say based on my experience in Jackson County, where I served as project manager on $56 million worth of projects, including a new juvenile detention facility, that certain board members seem to be expressing a much greater level of interest in design issues than I have previously seen expressed, in my prior experience,” Kanner said.

He would not name the person to whom he was referring.

The two jails

The Deschutes County jail has 228 beds, and the work center, which re-opened in early March, adds 90 more.

The planned expansion would add 250 beds, a courtroom and offices for court staff, and expand and remodel the booking area, according to county documents. The plans also include remodeling the existing jail.

The 2006 Beaver County jail expansion added 192 beds, according to Deschutes County. The project also added a few programming and staff rooms to the jail, said Johnson, the Beaver County commissioner. The jail commander, Lt. Keith Draper, said the county built the expansion in large part to house prisoners from the state of Utah.

“The state wanted us to expand down here because we had the substance abuse program and they’re short of beds, and we needed something in our county as an economic development thing,” Draper said.

The jail beds Deschutes County wants to add equate to 49,672 square feet of space, which does not include the other planned features, such as the courtroom, according to county documents. The beds added at the Beaver County jail equal 30,485 square feet, said Beaver County Building Official Craig Davis.

The estimated 2009 cost of an individual jail bed for the Deschutes County project is $60,694.40, according to a 2007 conceptual cost analysis that a consultant prepared for the county.

The 2006 cost of a bed in the Beaver County project was $41,666.67.

But when the Deschutes County administrator adjusted for the cost of paying the prevailing wage and 25 percent for inflation on construction costs from 2006 to 2009, Beaver County’s per-bed cost increased to $59,895.83.

Oregon requires payment of the prevailing wage on public projects. Utah does not.

Pressing the issue

Daly’s questions about staffing at the Deschutes County jail have been the most offensive aspect of the Utah trip for the sheriff.

Blanton told Daly on Monday that he would not participate in the Utah trip if Daly pressed the issue, and Daly suggested he would drop it. Blanton has said he sees value in touring jails to gather design ideas, and wants to separate the two issues.

However, in an interview Wednesday, Daly said he did not believe the county could separate jail design and staffing.

“Maybe we can use a minimum staff to operate that jail,” Daly said. “Construction is a one-time cost. Staff goes on forever.”

Deschutes County currently has 69 employees at the jail and 22 at the work center, said Jim Ross, operations business manager for the Sheriff’s Office. There are 43 correctional officers and nine sergeants at the jail. The remainder are support staff, such as nurses.

Beaver County officials gave slightly different numbers for the employees that run their jail. But generally the Utah county has around 40 corrections officers out of a total staff in the mid-50s.

Draper said the Beaver County jail’s main design component — a central command room that looks out over housing units spread out like spokes in a wheel — reduces staffing needs.

“It helps us monitor what is happening in each pod from a central location, and it also gives my control room operator the opportunity to watch the officers as they move through and keep track of them, which makes it efficient as far as watching inmates,” he said. “It’s a design a lot of corrections places are doing these days.”

In fact, Deschutes County already uses the design in its current facility.

Blanton believes it is inappropriate to compare staff and corrections philosophies at the two counties, especially since Deschutes County completed an assessment that included public input in 2005.

“This whole jail concept of touring is a good concept,” he said. “But not when talking about philosophy.”

Different philosophies

Blanton described his perception of corrections facilities in Utah as “warehousing prisoners” without treatment, and said the philosophy in Deschutes County is different.

“When I started in law enforcement 30 years ago, the philosophy was lock them up and throw the key away,” Blanton said.

More than 90 percent of inmates eventually leave jail, he said. “It’s our responsibility to reach as many of those people as we can, to provide treatment so they don’t continue to re-offend and be a burden on the taxpayer, and in doing so, we can affect recidivism in a positive way.”

Draper, from the Beaver County jail, said the facility offers programs such as classes to obtain general equivalency diplomas and culinary arts classes, and plans for a home building and building trades program are in the works.

Blanton said Deschutes County jail’s program goes above and beyond others, with basics such as GED classes augmented by CPR classes and plans to bring in a Toastmasters group to teach inmates how to speak in public.

On Monday, Blanton gave commissioners a packet of articles, including some that referred to an assault this year on guards at the Beaver County jail. Blanton did not suggest a link between that jail’s staffing level and prisoner violence, but Daly took it that way.

“I think he (Blanton) was trying to show, maybe that they were a little understaffed,” Daly said.

The Deschutes County jail has not had any assaults on corrections officers in the past year, said Capt. Ruth Jenkin.

Daly said he believes a trip to Utah would be valuable, and said he brings experience to the process, from working as an Oregon State Police trooper and later as an excavation contractor.

“I can’t imagine not learning something by going on this trip, and I can’t imagine not learning something that will save us money,” Daly said. “If we can reduce one staff person for a year, we can more than pay for the trip. When you’re talking a $40 million project, that’s some pretty small peanuts to go out and get some ideas. It’s doing your homework.”