This is the first story in a series regarding the future of Grant County jail and law enforcement. Grant County Commissioners are looking to add a possible bond issue for voters in the future.
Grant County Commissioners Marty Long, John Martin and Jay McGaughey invited Ulysses City Council members: Mayor Tim McCauley, along with council members: Ken Warner, Sam Guy, John Duran, Caleb Woods, Terry Maas and Mark Diaz to meet February 21.
The meeting was open to the public as well and was opened with a welcome by Long, commissioner chairman.
"Welcome everyone here today: city council, tax payers, citizens – welcome all," Long said. "We are here tonight because we invited Ulysses city council to meet with commissioners regarding the future of law enforcement in Grant County."
Long pointed out that they were looking at what "may or may not" be needed.
"What they may or may not look like - maybe we need to make changes, maybe we don’t," Long said. "We’ll discuss it… and as part of that discussion we will be talking about if it’s a good time or not to unify police and sheriff’s departments."
Long said even though the meeting was primarily to be with the Ulysses City Council, commissioners wanted to recognize "any and all citizens that want to speak." He noted anyone who wished to speak would have five minutes at the end of the discussion between the commissioners and council to speak.
Long provided a little background in to why the meeting was called.
"The commissioners feel we are to the point we need to star talking about building a new jail facility," he explained. "As most of you know, our facility was built in 1971, so it’s 50-plus years old. It was designed to last that long and it has lasted that long, but as it is with anything - if we are going to think about a new facility or remodeling an old facility - we have to reach a point where we start those conversations."
Long said some have asked, "Why now?"
"The answer I can give to that is two- or three-fold," he said. "The need for a new jail started being talked about six to eight years ago when Sheriff (Lance) Babcock was in office. He started making the commissioners aware of problem areas and (pointed out) that they were only getting worse. So things were done. A new sewer line was laid at one time across the street that prolonged the life of the facility."
Debt is a concern.
"Prior commissioners, and us (current commissioners) understand we don’t want to add debt – personal, property debt or county debt when we already have debt."
Something that may help with the debt load is that the last payment on the hospital will occur October 23.
"I can inform you all that the last payment on our hospital will occur October 23 - it's the final payment on a 19.5 million dollar bond voted on 15 years ago. Our final payment will be for 1.4 million. Before we go back in to debt (getting other debt paid for) is one thing we have all considered and talked about as very important to us."
Long said the second reason the discussion is going on now is timing.
"We think the timing is right is because things don’t get cheaper to build," he said.
"We can put this off and put this off longer and I think the end result will be that it will only cost more money."
The decision has not been made as yet whether a new facility should be built or if the current facility should be remodeled.
"We are seeking help from architects to (decide) that and we met with our first one (February 21)," Long said. "We also do not know the cost of a new facility. I think we intend on having a whole lot of town hall meetings to discuss that issue at the appropriate time when we know more. Right now we don’t know enough to go out and talk about that, but we are working on it."
Commissioners are looking at sales tax and property tax possibilities.
"We wanted to consider financing a new jail bond with a combination of sales tax and property tax," Long said. "Everything that has been built in Grant county has been paid entirely by property tax or funds from using it. The county has never had a sales tax. We thought it might be time to look at a sales tax or a combination of both sales and property tax, because a lot of times it’s considered a more fair tax – meaning not everyone pays property tax, but most everyone will contribute with a sales tax."
Long said commissioners thought it might be "appropriate" to look at financing the proposed facility with a combination of taxes depending on what the cost of the project might be.
"We called the Kansas Department of Revenue and we have estimated that a one cent sales tax would generate about 1.1 million dollars for the county," Long said. "As I said, the county has never had a sales tax. We first need to determine how much the project might cost and then determine how far that would go to make the bond payments."
According to Long, commissioners anticipate two questions to be on the ballot this fall.
"One would be for a bond to build a new facility for 'x' amount of dollars and then another separate question 'would you support the implementation of a county sales tax to raise the revenue to pay for it'," he said. "Obviously if the sales tax initiative fails, we will be forced to use property tax like we have always used it. If the bond issue to build a new jail fails we will probably be forced to remodel what we have."
Long said they don't yet have enough information to say what the cost of remodeling or building would be.
"We just don’t know at this point, but before it’s put out on a ballot or at town hall meetings we will know," he added. "When we start sitting down with the architects you know you have to make those first steps – we did that (February 21) and of course he has more questions for us and we have for him…. How many beds, do you want this or do you want that ….. what are your needs."
Long said they have advised the architect they spoke with thus far that they would want the administrative offices and dispatch to be all together with the jail.
He also noted they have not yet determined where a new jail would be built if that is the direction they go in for the project.
"That’s still to come," he said. "We have land owned on the outskirts of town in three or four places. Another option is to build back behind the courthouse and cannibalize that parking lot that is currently there. There is a lot of things about location we still haven’t talked about."
Long then brought up again the possibility of combining law enforcement.
"When we start talking about this thing we need to know if we’re going to move our offices or if there is a possibility the city and county would look at combining law enforcement – police and sheriff under one entity and move those offices out there," he said. "It’s been said by some people 'if it’s not broken why fix ?' If that’s the case we may plan on vacating our administration offices over here and turn our portion of that building to the city police - therefore doubling their size over there."
Long stressed they just "want to talk about it."
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