During an interview in his office on Thursday afternoon, Wayne County Executive Warren Evans said Thursday that he expects within the next few months to see a final plan in place for the long-stalled – and extremely costly – Wayne County jail, located on Gratiot Avenue. He also said he anticipates that the best option will be to complete the project currently in place rather than start construction all over again somewhere else, although he is not about to rule out other options – provided those options are better and cheaper.
Here is what he said:
“I think we will have a plan in the next several months. It may not be the only plan, because the plan is going to take months to finish. By ‘plan’, I want to be real clear, it’s a plan to finish a facility, and to finance it. Because we have $50 million left in bonds that haven’t been wasted from the previous project.
“But that’s not going to be enough to finish the project. And so, when we figure out what that number is, we’ve got to be able to borrow to fill that gap. And since so much money has been wasted already my whole priority is I’m gonna do what’s cheapest for the taxpayer. And I don’t really have a dog in the fight as to where it is. The money looks to us looks like finishing on the existing site is by far the cheapest way to go. But we’re not precluding someone coming up with another plan. We’ve got no pride of ownership here. The only pride of ownership is we don’t have to ask the taxpayers to pay any more than is necessary to get it done.
“At one point, Dan Gilbert said we’ll give you $20 million for the existing facility, and people were saying, ‘$20 million beats nothing. It’s just sitting over there.’ But what they don’t understand is we already borrowed $130 million. You take 20 off the 130 and I’m still paying $1 million a month on the debt service. We borrowed the money, we gotta pay the folks back. And so $20 million does nothing in reality. And then you don’t have the building either.
“There’s always talk about ‘why do you wanna do it downtown?’ and all of that, and, I mean, I don’t even have a dog in that fight. I do know, in most of the country, if you go look, the courts and the jails are downtown. They just are. Having said that, that doesn’t mean they have to be. It just gets back to, our whole issue is what’s the cheapest way to do it? And our math says the cheapest way is probably to finish the project that’s there. But If there’s enough time and we set it up in such a way that somebody comes up with a better program, or a better deal, then we can take the best deal for the taxpayers. To me it’s the biggest albatross in my lifetime that I’ve ever seen in one place. I go home some days happy that we’ve made the decisions that we have with respect to the finances, and we’re getting there. And you’re happy about it. And then you look up and see that thing, and you drop your head on the steering wheel, and say, ‘Jesus Christ, Wayne County screwed up’. It has a psychological effect. I would think that if I went past there one day and saw some caterpillars in there and some hardhats, and some sparks flying across those beams, my attitude would completely change. You can’t minimize image.”
According to the Detroit Free Press, “Wayne County Commissioners have approved what is being called an interim agreement that could lead to, but does not guarantee, resumption of construction of the long-stalled “fail jail” on Gratiot Avenue.
“The vote was 11-2, with commissioners Richard LeBlanc and Terry Marecki voting “no” and Commissioner Martha Scott abstaining. Commissioner Burton Leland was not at the meeting.
“The agreement would set the companies — AECOM Services of Michigan and programming subcontractor Ghafari Associates — to the task of offering redesigned and scaled-back jail designs, one for 1,944 beds and the other for 1,504 beds.”
Read the full interview with Wayne County Executive Warren Evans in next week’s Michigan Chronicle on Dec. 23.
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