CENTENNIAL | Arapahoe County officials gathered Thursday to watch construction crews work near the foundations of an expansion to the county’s jail, funded by COVID-19 relief funds and built to help inmates experiencing mental health problems and acute medical conditions.
The new building will house kitchen and laundry facilities for the jail, but moving those facilities from where they are currently and expanding the old building will make room for roughly 38 additional beds in a dedicated medical unit.
Right now, the jail has about 20 beds set aside for inmates suffering from medical problems. But Jared Rowlison, who commands the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office’s Detention Services Bureau, said those beds are consistently full, forcing the county to house sick inmates in other parts of the jail such as the booking area, where they can be observed by jail staff.
“Keeping a 35-plus-year-old facility running has a lot of challenges,” Rowlison said. “Every single day, medical is full. … It’s not ideal. Booking is a very busy place where people come in and people go out.”
The county has been squeezing capacity into its aging jail for years. Built in 1986 to house 386 inmates, the facility at the Arapahoe County Justice Center in Centennial has enough beds today to accommodate close to 1,500 people.
Sheriff’s office spokesman John Bartmann said 944 inmates were incarcerated there as of Thursday.
In 2019, two-thirds of county voters rejected a ballot item that would have raised property taxes to pay for replacing the jail. The 21,000-square-foot new kitchen and laundry building, 3,500-square-foot expansion to the old building and 4,500 square feet of new corridors will benefit from $30 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds left over from federal COVID-19 pandemic aid awarded to the county.
The project is expected to cost about $46 million in total. Sheriff Tyler Brown said it will specifically help the jail treat inmates experiencing drug and alcohol withdrawal, and create a dedicated space for participants in his office’s new peer navigator program to meet with inmates.
“The needs of the people that we are in custody of have changed,” Brown said. “We’re not warehousing individuals anymore. We’re treating them.”
Officials who spoke Thursday said the multi-phase project is expected to take about two years to complete.
In 2019, two-thirds of county voters rejected a ballot item that would have raised property taxes to pay for replacing the jail. Funding was found anyway (also ultimately from us taxpayers’ pockets) and here we are four years later facing the biggest property tax hike (and not by coincidence, the biggest jump in homelessness) in Colorado history. Sworn government officials, from Governor Polis to the Legislature, to county boards statewide whine that they are helpless to do anything about it. Arapahoe County’s own Assessor told me personally that he would do nothing about it earlier this year. Didn’t any of them notice the economy of the state (including the ability of taxpayers to generate the wealth with which to pay any taxes) being trashed by government mandates which were enFORCEd by armed law officers in that time interval? Yet their plunder goes on.
I’m terribly confused when the Sheriff of my county believes he doesn’t need to just be a jailor but also needs to be a psychologist. I so want to return to the old fashioned ways because they are simple and they worked properly.