Oct 15, 2013 6 min read

(This is the second in a two-part series. The article was written by Evelyn Hovanec, Dave Show, Terry Ryan, Ed Zadylak, John Buchanan along with members of the Fayette Patriots and other concerned taxpayers.

Some other more rhetorical questions and comments have been raised by our “study group” and are noted below.

Mr. Crabtree seems to place little credence in the day reporting plan already contracted for by the county, based on his comments at the four meetings and his quote in the 10/01/13 edition of the Herald-Standard.

Yet in analyzing why Fayette County has more arrests and incarcerations than other counties he stated that the answer is DUIs, exactly the type of people who are candidates for the Day Reporting Program.

Thus, we feel that by the time construction starts, about 5O inmates will be out of the jail and into this program. The program is designed to handle 50 or more people and has proven successful in many other counties. The Crabtree study compounds the jail population at 2.6 percent  per year and and then adds another 10 percent for peak times And another 8 percent for something else to justify the need for 480 beds. This is a convoluted and confusing method of projecting bed capacity needs.

Also, in projecting costs for option 1, renovating the current jail, the study projects the need for over 90,000 square feet making all the costs to renovate the current jail much higher than need be. The study even includes a parking garage line item of between $2.3 million to $2.5 million. Why? If Uniontown were short of parking spaces this might be understandable but we have two parking garages within walking distance of the courthouse with ample space to accommodate county employees who might be displaced because of expanding our current jail.

It appears every effort was made to make option 1 look more expensive. Let’s take a simpler and more comprehensive look at how we could solve the prison problem for about half the $30 million projected by Mr. Ambrosini and his proponents.

Mr. Crabtree’s construction costs for 164,000 square feet, 39,600 square feet of which are for a parking garage. We have already addressed the lack of need for that. The study appears to be projecting the need for about 95,000 square feet at a cost of about $21 millon.

Have the commissioners considered that numerous small townships and municipalities in our county have no police force and depend on the state police for coverage? Have they paid attention to State Rep. Tim Mahoney’s efforts to find what police coverage our county is getting?

So far they have only told him that we have 16 state police slots not filled slots in Fayette County but he is certainly on the right track. Do the commissioners not realize that “cops on the street “is an important part of the entire incarceration issue? Getting adequate police coverage for our county must be addressed soon and will take tax dollars from somewhere. Improving our current prison is only part of the solution. We need to drive the drug peddlers and users out of our countyl

Considering the loss of jobs from two power stations closing, Sensus closing another department, the hospital closing several departments, people being cut back to 30-hour weeks because of Obamacare, a 15 percent cutback in employees at Lady Luck Casino, the closing of BAE Systems, and taxpayers medical expenses going up because of Obamacare (particularly retired folks on Medicare), is this really the time for Fayette County to take on debt of the magnitude to build a new state of the art jail when we a suggesting a much less expensive alternative?

We realize that this solution will not likely change the minds of the two commissioners who committed to a totally new prison approach from the outset even before any analysis was done, so we will likely see the new prison built as they want it. However, we feel the taxpayers deserve to know that there could have been alternative solutions which would be considerably less costly that were not even considered by the Crabtree Facility Analysis.

A few additional rhetorical questions and comments from our group remain. Why did the commissioners announce from the outset that we needed to build a new prison and then release only limited and sometimes incorrect information until the Crabtree Analysis was made available on the internet?

Do the commissioners really believe that those attending the public meetings could absorb the information Mr. Crabtree presented? Do the commissioners see any similarity between the manner in which they handled this jail issue and the way we had Obamacare shoved down our throats?

Based on the above questions do you see why taxpayers are confused and suspicious? What is the largest bond our county has ever issued? Did the commissioners review a study done about eight years ago by Kimbell  to expand our current jail for about $6 million?

How much will it cost to run inmates from the fairgrounds area to the courthouse and back on a daily basis?

Mr. Crabtree did convey a great deal of information during his one-hour presentation and he certainly has a good knowledge of the prison construction. Our questions and suggestions are in no way meant to reflect upon his integrity or expertise. His price of $24,000 is a real bargain and since he will be bidding to serve as the architect, the knowledge he has gained from his analysis should give him an inside track providing no one comes in significantly lower.

Mr Crabtree did a good job of doing exactly what Commissioner Ambrosini hired him to do -show that Fayette County needs to build a new prison. Mr. Killinger’s scare tactic that because of the many deficiencies for which our jail was written up will cause our jail to be closed is totally incorrect. Most of these deficiencies are procedural and can be corrected by simply writing a procedure manual and following it -not building a new jail.

Everybody involved in this writing as well as many other citizens were greatly disappointed to see that Commissioner Ambrosini, Controller Sean Lally, and Mr. Killinger had to stoop to the level of writing public letters which were uncalled for, untimely, incorrect and downright nasty in attacking the integrity and character of Commissioner Zimmerlink. If you don’t like the message, kill the messenger.

As mentioned earlier, we don’t expect this writing to change the votes of the two majority commissioners. Thus, we pray that Mr. Crabtree’s bid to serve as architect is low that we get a favorable interest rate and that the Marcellus shale funds and gambling funds flow soon and exceed all expectations

Good Luck and God bless it