The Española Police are on the verge of moving into a newly renovated station, putting the Española Jail next on the list for a face lift.
To make way for construction work at the jail, the city has reached an agreement with the Los Alamos County Jail to hold the city’s inmates at $85 per day starting Oct. 15.
Deputy Police chief Larry Ham said Los Alamos will function as a processing center while renovations are done to the jail, which should take about three months.
“It’s just taking the place of our actual holding area right now,” Ham said.
Plans call for the current two-room holding area to be transformed into a more suitable jail. It should be complete by the beginning of 2009, although the contract with Los Alamos County Jail is effective until June 2010, according to Los Alamos Police Lt. Randy Foster. Española Jail Director Ted Garcia said the contract will continue to remain in effect in case it is necessary to use Los Alamos’ facilities after the renovation is complete.
Garcia said the intent is to use Los Alamos only in cases when the city can’t use the McKinley County Jail. Since McKinley County, which the jail contracts with at $55 an inmate, only allows inmate transports during the day time, Los Alamos will be used for overnight transports.
Although Los Alamos County inmates can be held indefinitely at their facility, the contract allows Española inmates to be kept there up to five days. McKinley County Jail is a long-term holding facility for Española inmates, Garcia said.
When Los Alamos is used, individuals will come in to the Española facility for booking, which should take about an hour, then be transported to Los Alamos for holding, back to Española for arraignment, then to one of the facilities that the jail has contracts with: Santa Fe, McKinley and Rio Arriba counties. The contract with Rio Arriba is in the process of being renegotiated, Garcia said.
If McKinley County’s transport is open, after booking an individual will be transported there, have a video arraignment and if necessary stay there, Garcia said. Transport to McKinley County is done in a relay with McKinley County Sheriff’s deputies, Garcia said, with Española Jail officers meeting the deputies in Albuquerque for a shorter trip.
Estimates of how much extra fuel the additional transportation to Los Alamos will cost has not been worked out, Garcia said. However additional funds were budgeted for maintenance and fuel in the jail’s 2009 budget with the possibility of the deal with Los Alamos in mind, he said.
The jail is also considering what to do with individuals who come in under custody for detox, he said. The contract with Los Alamos does not allow for such individuals — those who have been arrested for public intoxication but are not charged with a crime — to be transported there, he said. Ham said there is the possibility of setting up a room in the Department’s current area where those individuals will be placed until ready to leave.
Currently, Española Jail holds most inmates for no longer than four hours, but typically keeps people for detox about eight hours, Garcia said.
While the jail waits for renovations to be completed, it will not be able to hold any other agency’s inmates, Garcia said. Currently the Jail holds Rio Arriba County inmates temporarily when necessary.
“We’ll barely be able to handle our own,” he said.
Blue Sky Builders, of Española, has been contracted to do the construction project. According to their contract the city will pay $620,996 for the renovations of the police department and the jail.
New Police Station
The Police Department is looking to start moving into the renovated area by Friday, if it is granted a certificate of occupancy, Ham said. Renovations began around July, Public Safety Chief Julian Gonzales said. All the work was completed on schedule, he said.
“They might even be a little ahead,” he said.
The new facility will have its own entrance and lobby area as opposed to the current set up in which anyone going to the Department has to pass through the entrance to the jail.
There will also be a vault that includes lockers that will store evidence while an evidence custodian is unavailable. In the current facility there is no such locker and officers have to hold on to or be held responsible for evidence when the custodian is not available, Ham said. The new system has a much better chain of command, he said.
A blood-borne pathogens cabin is another new addition, it would provide storage for evidence that has blood on it, he said.
“Now we just put them in another room and let them dry,” he said.
The new area will have 13 offices as compared to the two the facilities now have, as well as a briefing room, an interview and observation room with a one-way mirror and an armory, Ham said.
Renovations to the jail will bring three separate holding cells for males, females and juveniles, Garcia said, with a total capacity of 16 inmates. Right now when there is a mixture of men, women and juveniles, the men are kept in the holding cell, while the women are secured in an area outside of the holding cell and juveniles are secured in the lobby, he said.
Another added security measure will be a sally port, a garage that officers will drive into then close and secure before removing suspects from their vehicle.
“Most of the time when a person has tried to escape they do it when the officer is taking them out of the car,” Ham said.
Garcia said the separate entrance will also add safety.
“The public won’t be exposed to anybody that’s currently detained,” he said.
The jail will still function as a holding facility, Garcia said. There’s a private company, The Emerald Group, trying to establish a regional jail that holds inmates more for extended amounts of time, Ham said. The company is in the process of looking for land, and if they find it they’ll move forward, he said.
There are other plans in the works for the jail and the police department, as well. Ham said that in the long-term Gonzales is looking to find funding to build a permanent facility that would hold the fire department, police department and municipal court all in one location.
“We’re anticipating we will be in this facility after it is remodeled for at least five years,” he said. “It could be a little more or a little less.”
Gonzales said those plans are in the very early stages and no formal discussions have taken place. How much such a project would cost is still unknown, he said, but just to build a police department and fire station could be around $12 million.
The jail and police department moved into their current location, a warehouse off Industrial Park Road, about two years ago under emergency circumstances when the roof at its old facilities at city hall collapsed. The short-term goal for the jail and police department was to find the necessary funding to get the warehouse up to a standard that would suit their needs, he said. City officials have admitted that the current jail did not meet federal regulations.
To date $182,172 has been paid out to Blue Sky Contractors for the renovation work, Grants Administrator Lupita De Herrera said. The funding comes from state appropriations, city general funds, a state board of finance loan and Los Alamos County.