Española city officials had their giant ribbon-cutting scissors poised, but completion of their new jail has encountered a delay.
Under final inspection, fire-safety officials took issue with the building’s lack of internal sprinklers.
The state Fire Marshal’s office has recommended that the city’s occupancy permit be denied until such internal sprinklers are installed in the jail, state Public Regulation Commission spokesman Paul Carbajal said.
“If something were to happen, there is no fire protection,” Carbajal said. “If they can’t get the inmates out in a way to save their lives, the sprinkler system is not in place to help remedy that.”
Blue Sky Builders Vice President Ryan Cordova said the additional work will likely run the city around $50,000. That’s about 15 percent of the cost of the jail’s construction at a warehouse on Industrial Park Road, which is being paid for with city and state funds plus a small grant from Los Alamos County. The money was also used to construct new offices for the Police Department, which were completed by the Española-based construction company in October.
Cordova said installing sprinklers in the jail will require punching one small hole in a newly completed wall, along with installation of a drain. But it would have cost just as much to install the sprinklers during construction, Cordova said.
“I understand there is a fire suppression line to the building,” Cordova said. “So that will save them a lot of money and infrastructure as far as not having to put a four-inch line from the road to the building.”
Cordova said he estimates it will take 30 days to complete the project once he gets the go-ahead. The new jail was originally supposed to be completed in January, four years after the previous City Council voted to close the dilapidated, overcrowded and escape-friendly jail adjacent to City Hall.
The city continued to use the old jail as a temporary holding facility until the summer of 2006 when the roof collapsed during a heavy rainstorm. Ever since, the city has been holding inmates at a temporary facility inside the city-owned warehouse and shipping its prisoners to county jails in Santa Fe and Gallup. The city currently budgets $510,000 to pay for those latter services. It will continue to do so even after the new facility is finished, since the cells are designed to be a temporary holding facility only.
Blue Sky’s construction contract to build both the jail and the Police Department offices was for $576,331.
Through change orders dealing with increased material costs and design changes, that price had already increased by about $28,400 before the sprinkler development.
Architect John Pate, of Molzen-Corbin Associates, did not return a call seeking comment on why the sprinklers were not included in the original design of the jail.
Cordova said the sprinkler issue is not a design oversight or a mistake. Rather, it’s rooted in a long-running debate over whether the city is operating a jail or a holding facility.
“(State Fire Marshal) Ray Wolf understood the facility as being like a detention center,” Cordova said. “The architects had it classified as a processing center.”
The distinction matters because at a true jail like the one Rio Arriba County runs in Tierra Amarilla, inmates can be held indefinitely, usually while awaiting a plea deal or a trial. A “processing center” or “holding facility” has fewer codes and regulations, but can generally only hold people for four to eight hours before transporting them to a jail.
Ever since 2005, when the old city jail officially ceased operations, the city has maintained that its bare-bones cells at City Hall, and later on Industrial Park Road, constitute a holding facility. So when it made plans to renovate the Industrial Park space, which was no more than a room inside the building, with eight new holding cells and new offices for the Police Department, it labeled the architectural plans as a class B building — essentially an office building, Cordova said.
The state Construction Industries Division approved the plans, which apparently never went to the state Fire Marshal’s office. A Division spokeswoman said it is the contractor’s duty to get approval from any other agencies that may have oversight, including the state Fire Marshal.
But that didn’t happen, so the issue wasn’t raised until the Fire Marshal’s office asked Española Fire Chief Ray Wolf to inspect the completed building. Wolf is a predecessor of Kitchen’s as Española fire chief.
Kitchen said he marked on his inspection form that the building didn’t have a fire-suppression system.
He didn’t know whether the building needed one, so he referred the matter back to Wolf.
Wolf came to the conclusion that sprinklers are necessary, and he wondered why they weren’t included from the beginning, Carbajal said.
“It’s an issue for us: why this wasn’t incorporated in the original redesign of the building,” Carbajal said.
Cordova said Molzen-Corbin has built and opened several holding facilities without sprinkler systems.
“This is unfortunate, but it’s something that basically comes down to interpretation,” Cordova said.