By David Bracken
The News & Observer
Citing dangers of crowding, Md. officials seek jail expansion
RALEIGH, N.C. — Mayor Charles Meeker may live in Boylan Heights, but he’s also the leader of a city that does an awful lot of business with the state of North Carolina.
That fact may help explain how the City Council quietly and unanimously approved a massive expansion of Central Prison that many Boylan Heights residents found out about only last week.
The council’s vote last June is actually the second prison expansion to be approved by the city over the last year. In March, the council unanimously approved the addition of a 108,712-square-foot medical facility at the state Correctional Institute for Women in Southeast Raleigh.
Councilman Philip Isley said residents should keep in mind that the Central Prison expansion is also a health-care facility.
“It’s not like they’re trying to expand the prison yard or the execution chamber,” Isley said. “This is not the most awful situation in the world.”
Isley argued that opposing the state’s prison expansion plans could have had wider repercussions for the city. Raleigh is negotiating with the state on a host of issues, including the future of Dorothea Dix Hospital. The city wants to eventually buy Dix from the state and turn it into a park, but the General Assembly would have to approve the purchase.
Meeker said he considered the expansion of Central Prison separate from Dix or any other outstanding legislative issues. He defended his support for the project, noting that property owners were notified, a public hearing was held and the city’s requirements were met.
Both Meeker and Councilman Thomas Crowder, who represents Boylan Heights, said they will help the neighborhood with its effort to get the state to go beyond the minimum buffer requirements.
The mayor was out of town Tuesday night when about 70 of his neighbors attended a meeting to learn more about the $151 million project, which includes a five-story inmate medical center and mental hospital. Many said they first learned of the project last week when trees and old prison buildings were bulldozed to make way for the 315,000-square-foot expansion.
Council member Russ Stephenson said he wishes there had been more public awareness of the project. Before the vote last year, Stephenson said, he had private discussions with other council members about how the expansion might affect the chances of Central Prison ever being relocated outside the city. But Stephenson said he concluded that the Raleigh City Council would have little influence over any decision to move the prison.
Isley, too, questioned whether opposing the state’s prison expansion plans would have been futile. Last year, he noted, the General Assembly stripped Raleigh of its power to approve or deny projects within a six-block radius of the Capitol after the city delayed a state parking deck in the area.
Isley: Denying state plans might have backfired.
Copyright 2008 The News and Observer