It was supposed to be a short meeting . . . but the community isn’t giving up on derailing the jail. They had to use the overflow room again – there were people in the hallway that wouldn’t fit into the room again at the beginning of the meeting. The meeting was disrupted a few times and ended with more voting with thumbs up or down.
PLEDGE OF THE ALLEGIANCE
The Derail the Jail coalition took a knee during the pledge.
SPENDING TO FIX THE JAIL
F.8. on the agenda last night was
CHANGE ORDER #1 TO CONTRACT FOR JOE DANIELS CONSTRUCTION COMPANY, INC. FOR JAIL MITIGATION UPGRADES
It was a change order to add $10,000 to the cost of rehabbing the jail for “locking mechanisms, hardware and surrounding areas” by the contractor Joe Daniels Construction.
Heidi Wegleitner asked about the funding for the jail. The contract was $2.4M and they’ve added about $161,000 for good reasons to remediate the lead paint, but she wants to know where we are at in terms of money already borrowed and what’s left.
Chuck Hicklin, the Controller says that he doesn’t have that information available at the meeting but he can certainly follow up with Supervisor Wegleitner. He says he assumes that she is talking about the $8M we are spending to fix the jail?
Wegleitner says yes and asks if he can just estimate it.
Hicklin says that he would hesitate to answer without a full accounting of the project status and other elements that might affect that.
They vote to add more money anyways.
BORROWING RESOLUTION
There was a lot of powerful testimony. I hoped to share it via video with you this morning, but I’m waiting for the settings by citichannel to be fixed, so I can download. Otherwise you can watch here starting at about 1 hour in (1:02). Discussion by the board starts another hour later (1:58)
Discussion starts with chants of “Derail the Jail” and “Jails get handouts, we get sold out”
Discussion
Heidi Wegleitner thanks the speakers that came out for their overwhelming testimony. Once again very compelling, rooted in fact, rooted in personal experience, traumatic, harmful impact by people who’s family members who have been incarcerated unnecessarily and unfairly and who have been victimized by a broken criminal justice system that perpetuates in Dane County. Thank you for coming out, thank you for speaking your truth, thank you for informing us on your opposition to this.
She has some questions for staff. She asks the controller how much money will be spent in 2018 budget year of the $76 million. Hicklin says there was a Request for Proposals for the construction manager and they will be doing a resolution for the architect and engineer. Only $5M would be spent this year and the balance over the other two years depending upon the construction schedule and the schedule of payments to the contractor.
Wegleitner asks what this resolution does, why is the entire $76 million is in this resolution if we will be borrowing it this year. Controller says that the practice of the county is that they do the resolution now so the projects can move forward, but when they borrowing is needed they borrow at that time.
Wegleitner says we are not borrowing yet, but we are authorizing it. She says her concerns are the same as for the budget, they center around the 777 homeless single adults, the 276 chronically homeless individuals, the 31 homeless veterans, the 65 homeless youth, the 90 homeless families, the 19 chronically homeless families, that’s 1,259 identified homeless that we have on the community priority list. What is not in this resolution is authority to borrow the $25M of the amendment she authored to cover 130-140 of the people on this list. But, it would have been real tangible and would have provided something that works that support people, to provide stability, to reduce recidivism, and cycling in and out of jail because of poverty, homelessness, substance use. She doesn’t think this resolution, this authority to borrow at this point in time is a good reflection of the values of the board because she has heard them talk a lot about their concern for reducing racial disparities, and trying to lead on issues. She has seen extensive committee work on producing recommendations for this board. A lot of community time invested, a lot of people coming to testify, a lot of staff time involved, reports, audits, lists go on and on and on of the things we could be doing. We are moving forward slightly with a mental health restoration center with our $100,000 study to find the gaps in the mental health system, which we have heard from Ms. Smith’s testimony are significant and not how it should work. So why, why are we authorizing this $76M in borrowing right now? When there is so many questions that still need to be answered, when this borrowing resolution doesn’t involve a crisis restoration center, to build one to give law enforcement and crisis workers another option to help somebody, to bring them someplace safe where they don’t end up in jail and they don’t end up 3 hours away. Where their family can see them and support them and assist in their recovery. Where they can get connected with services and support and permanent supportive housing. That’s what they need. We’ve heard testimony from people who work in our mental health system. This this is kicking the can down the road, refusing to make tough decisions, refusing to get off that escalator or run vigorously against it. We have to, we have to get our act together and move aggressively because that escalator is persistent, its built on decades, centuries of systems of oppression. (The escalator was referred to in Erica Bach’s testimony) It’s not all our fault, but we are the ones in these seats that have to make the tough decisions. And this is one of them, and we aren’t even going to be spending that money this year, we don’t even know what’s left in the balance from the last time we borrowed $8M, because we granted $8M of authority that did not need to be spent at the time. That’s how much mass incarceration controls the operations of this board. Doesn’t even matter what the balance is, because we know we can just borrow more. We can authorize more. I think that is wrong, because you know every non-profit, every human services provider that we contract with, they know how much money they have left, they know what their capital improvement needs are, they know every day they are turning away people that need help, that they can’t pay their staff enough, and its harder and harder to do their jobs. I think that’s out of balance, I think something needs to change. And I don’t see any reason why we need to vote for $76M in authority for this jail construction project right now, so she is going to be voting no and she asks them to think strongly about their vote and consider voting no as well.
Carousel Bayrd says that when she voted for the budget there was an amendment – P&F C #4, sponsored by Corrigan, Dye and herself. It explicitly said that the funding for the jail project is contingent on the funding in the operating and capital budget. The amendment was important to her, its important that they move all these issues forward at the same time. One of the items was the mental health restoration center. She says that is not in the resolution tonight. She says that there are no costs for the early childhood zones in here. Her vote included these items being in there. It’s important that we follow through on that commitment. She reads the amendment. She says that alternatives to incarceration much be moved forward just just as efficiently as this. She thought Wegleitner was going to move to remove the jail from the resolution. She is going to consult with Wegleitner about doing that.
Paul Rusk wants to review the facts. These are facts. The 6th and 7th floor includes maximum security. We’ve wanted the sheriff to close it down and get rid of the conditions, then where do the 350 go. They have not been determined to be safe to have them in the community. “There is shipping.” We were really worried about how unsafe up there it was so maybe we should just close it down and “ship them”. And then we wouldn’t have to worry about anybody dying. Well, guess what, nobody wants our 350 people in solitary confinement. They won’t take them and even if we could find jail space for them its millions and millions and millions of dollars in “shipping”, which we had before Sheriff Mahoney was elected and we put people on electronic monitoring. We had some testimony tonight that people understand how unsafe it is. And that’s true. It’s so unsafe that we couldn’t increase the county’s insurance. We have been working on this issue for a decade or more and its just a matter of time. (Someone yells, how has that been going for you?) The money we are spending now is just a temporary band-aid and we have it in writing, we have the consultants here. If we don’t do this – he raises his arms and he says that he is sorry that people object to his emotionalism about this – but we do have 40 people per day with mental health issues that are in solitary confinement right in this building and its terrible when they go to – they can’t go to Mendota most of the time – so they go to Winnebago and its a terrible place. He read all the emails and he didn’t know how to respond, but he did read all those emails and you know, whatever. They are not going to go to Meriter, they are not going to go to UW hospital, they are not going to go to Mendota, they are going to be here with us, the sheriff doesn’t have the ability to say no, he wishes he did. Outbursts and Sharon Corrigan gavels them down and interrupts Supervisor Rusk.
Corrigan says that you asked for us to talk about it and discuss it and she would appreciate it if they would listen while Supervisor Rusk speaks as supervisors listens to you. (Please note, that while Wanda Smith was telling her story about what happened to her daughter, there were several people, including Jeremy Levin who is the chair of Health and Human Needs that were doing thing on their phone and not listening. Ironically, you can see him not paying attention to Rusk either – he’s on his phone in the video.)
Rusk wants to end the 40 a day, it has been bothering him for over a decade that he hasn’t been able to do more to end that. (Forgive me, but why don’t you just retire then and let someone else try. OVER 10 YEARS YOU”VE BEEN TRYING???) And the new project does. It’s a consolidation, its not an expansion. That is the beauty of all of this, this county board has been actually paving the way for major reform of the criminal justice system and key thing that we have to do is the restoration court and we need 1000s of people to go to the restoration court. Suupervisors Stubbs has started it and we have had problems expanding it. That will make a difference over time but if we don’t do anything somebody is going to die and the amount of money we are going to have to die is humongous and that comes out of human services most likely – where else – and then we exacerbate the problem. The modern health care beds that we need will come in this project. We also consolidate and don’t increase GPR spending that much, there is a little bit of a bump in GPR spending. And that’s good, its capital borrowing. We have a $6M contract for mental and regular health services in the Dane County Jail. This county board did that, he remembers when they added $600,000 for 24/7 mental health in the jail, its not as good as it could be, but its not proper health care beds. The issue of the jail bond we have gone over again and again and again and we have even had a jail bond fund, it didn’t work very well. We need to do more work in that area but its not true that there are hundreds of people in our jail because they can’t afford to pay bail. There is helpfulness in all of this – it is the change in the judiciary – when he was first elected he went toe to toe with the judiciary over child support and he got off to a very bad start – and one of the judges still runs to the other end of the room when he sees him, but that is changing and we are electing better judges and since this is 91 beds less that is going to force reform of the system. The jail population has actually been dropping in recent years and this is going to make it go down and we will continue to work on the mental health issues. There are huge gaps in our system, but its not just money, we spend $34M on adult mental health, its not just money. Why aren’t people with regular health insurance getting help from the regular mental health system. Our POS agencies coordinating and working as well as we should. There are a lot of things that need to happen in the mental health delivery system. If we take this out we are going to continue the status quo, there are still going to be 40 people in solitary confinement and we’re still going to have the problem of the 350 upstairs in maximum security. We will bring in the Huber from Alliant so we have all three of the jails in one building. He realizes that we have been talking about this for years, they have had study after study after study and they have made a fair amount of progress to limit the number of people in the jail, but they will still be talking.
Corrigan interrupts and says he has one minute.
He says they have the responsibility to inmates in the jail to make sure they are safe, but also to staff.
Jenni Dye talks about the amendment that Bayrd referred to and says that those costs were in the operating budget – but they have to have an RFP process. She shares Bayrd’s concerns that they move forward with alternatives to incarcertaion, mental health and building families up so they don’t intersect with the criminal justice system. But she is supporting this. We have to reduce the number of people in jail, but they also have to make sure if they do that they are treated with respect and dignity. They are not doing that today and we have to do better.
No: Bayrd, Hendrick, Kilmer, Wegleitner
Ferrell had left.
Everyone else voted for it.
About half way through the vote the chanting to derail the jail began. They had to start voting with thumbs up and thumbs down again.
The rest of the meeting was uninteligible in the room. They just wrapped up and adjourned, there were no other business on the agenda.
