Financing for Fulton’s $1.3B jail project in hands of obscure jail authority
Fulton County’s $1.36 billion financing plan for its jail project rests in the hands of five board members of a little-known jail authority created decades ago, and controlled by current and former officials of Union City and Palmetto.
County officials are asking the board for the South Fulton Municipal Regional Jail Authority to approve a resolution authorizing the authority to issue bonds for the massive project that could take a decade to complete.
Under the financing plan, the jail authority would issue bonds periodically, and the county would use revenue from its general fund to pay the principal and interest on the debt through the authority.
The project involves building an 1,800-bed “special purpose facility” for inmates with mental health or other medical conditions, renovating the troubled Rice Street jail, and possibly building another 500-bed detention facility.
Union City and Palmetto created the jail authority in the mid-1990s for the purpose of issuing bonds for construction of a jail in Union City. According to the jail authority’s bylaws, Union City and Palmetto each appoint two of the five board members, and those four appoint the fifth member.
Fulton spokesperson Jessica Corbitt said the county chose the authority to issue the bonds because it already exists for the very purpose of financing jail projects.
The initial meeting on the bond issuance didn’t go in the county’s favor.
The jail authority’s board failed to pass the resolution July 6, deadlocking with a 2-2 vote in the absence of one of its members, Union City Police Chief Cassandra Jones.
Fulton County Finance Director Ray Turner told board members at the meeting that the county would try to find an alternate funding source if the authority refuses to issue the bonds, but that would pose “some real challenges for us.”
Turner said one option the county considered is a special sales tax. But Corbitt said a countywide sales tax for a jail capital improvement program would require legislation to lift the 9% statewide sales cap.
“Sales tax within the City of Atlanta is already 8.9% and some other municipalities have a Municipal Option Sales Tax,” Corbitt said in an email.
Fulton County commissioners have debated the jail issue for years — through overcrowding, understaffing and deterioration of the Rice Street facility.
The issue has taken on new urgency recently after a Department of Justice investigation found conditions inside the Rice Street facility to be dangerous and unconstitutional. The county has entered into a legal agreement, called a consent decree, with the DOJ to improve those conditions.
Now the issue is being debated by the jail authority’s board members, who are unaccountable to the vast majority of county voters, or the county government.
Board Chair J. Clark Boddie, the former Palmetto mayor, and former Palmetto councilman John Farr voted in favor of authorizing issuance of the bonds. Palmetto Mayor Teresa Thomas-Smith and Union City council member Angelette Mealing opposed the resolution.
Thomas-Smith and Mealing said they could not support a huge project that affects the entire county without more information and more time to consider it. Thomas-Smith said the authority’s board is suddenly being rushed to make the decision even though problems at the Rice Street jail should have been addressed many years ago.
The Fulton County Board of commissioners unanimously approved the financing plan for the project in April.
Thomas-Smith called it “backwards” to build the special-purpose facility first and then start renovating the main jail five years from now.
“Are you going to continue to put a band aid on a gunshot wound of a jail that people are being harmed in?” Thomas-Smith told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, adding: “God knows how many more things are going to happen in there while we’re building another facility first.”
County officials say it’s necessary to build the special-purpose facility first because the renovation work needed in the main jail is so extensive that entire towers must be emptied of inmates to complete it.
Those detainees will need to be held somewhere while the work is being done.
“That gives us the maximum flexibility to empty a tower, put them in the new facility and then go in and do all the renovations completely unencumbered, and then move to the next tower and switch the inmates over,” Steve Nawrocki, the county’s director of justice system programs, told the jail authority’s board on July 6.
Details of the project are evolving, but officials see a pressing need to prepare for an end to the county’s lease agreement with the city of Atlanta for detention space in the Atlanta City Detention Center.
County officials hope to extend the lease past this year, but are considering an “accelerated build” of a $140 million facility, with 400 to 500 beds, to help absorb those detainees if the lease is not extended.
Officials said the rapid build could take place off-site and the structure then could be brought to and assembled at the “Rice Street campus,” which is also where the special-purpose building will sit.
The officials expect the $734 million special-purpose facility would be built and occupied by 2031. Renovation of the main jail would cost an estimated $489 million.
At the July 6 meeting, Boddie said the situation in the county’s main jail is “bad and it’s been bad for a while.”
“The citizens of Fulton County deserve better, and the only way that it’s going to get better is if we go through this plan right here,” Boddie said of the bond resolution.
“The project will go forward, whether it’s through the conduit using us or whether you go through a more expensive financial situation,” he added.
Thomas-Smith said she does not oppose building a new facility, and thinks the Rice Street jail should be demolished and replaced by a new one. Building an entirely new jail was one of the options debated and rejected by the Fulton commission.
“I want it to be done with full transparency,” she said of any Fulton jail project. “And I want it to be done right the first time. We don’t have a second opportunity to figure this out with that massive price tag.”
The authority will meet again on Monday, and could take another vote on the issue then.