By Marc Benjamin
The Fresno Bee
FRESNO, Calif. — Three years after the Claremont Custody Center in Coalinga closed, city officials are weary of the growing financial burden and are considering selling the jail.
The City Council will take up the issue tonight.
The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had leased the building from the city for 20 years after it opened in 1991.
The jail was closed when the state prison realignment program began shifting inmates to county jails. The state removed inmates from the Coalinga jail and three similar Kern County jails that were under state contracts.
Today, the city’s 70,000-square-foot jail is a costly vacancy.
So Coalinga wants to see if there may be buyers.
“The idea is to put it out there and see what kind of interest there is,” City Manager Rene Ramirez said.
The city had to lay off 90 employees and lost about $1 million in annual revenue when the jail closed. In addition, the city and local businesses lost money from local purchases by employees and the jail, which had a $5 million payroll and an $8 million annual budget. Inmates also had provided a cheap source of labor on city projects.
Simply put: It’s caused havoc on the city budget, Ramirez said.
Since the closure, the city has been in hopes of getting a new contract with the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The state filled similar jails in Shafter, Delano and Taft, but there are no plans for Coalinga, said Dana Simas, a Sacramento-based state corrections spokeswoman.
“We don’t have a contract with Coalinga and we don’t have any plans to house state prison inmates in Coalinga,” she said. “There are opportunities because there are cells there but (corrections) has no plans to house state prison inmates.”
Ramirez said state corrections officials began meeting with him last October but are no longer discussing using the jail.
“They said they didn’t have any more need for bed space and that’s why we are trying to sell it,” he said.
State officials told Ramirez they had concerns about Valley fever, which has been a problem for inmates and officers at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga and Avenal State Prison, about 25 miles to the southeast in Kings County.
But Ramirez wonders why the three other jails -- all in Kern County -- were offered contracts, when the rate of Valley fever cases is more than four times higher in Kern County than Fresno County. Kern County also has a 50% higher rate of cases than Kings County, according to state Department of Public Health records.
Officials continually dwelled on the Valley fever cases at Avenal and Pleasant Valley, but Claremont “never had a Valley fever case and we were open for 20 years,” Ramirez said.
Inmates in Coalinga’s Pleasant Valley State Prison and Avenal State Prison contracted Valley fever at much higher rates than state prison inmates elsewhere, according to state records.
A state Department of Public Health report found that from 2008 to 2013, there were 1,243 cases of Valley fever at Pleasant Valley and 757 at Avenal. There were 2,704 cases in the state’s 32 prisons over the same period.
This year, there are just 28 cases statewide -- 12 at Pleasant Valley and Avenal -- reported through mid-July.
State prison officials say the drop results from moving inmates most susceptible to Valley fever, but that wasn’t why the state decided not to put inmates back into Claremont.
“We make decisions for a whole range of factors,” said Jeffrey Callison, press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. “We just made a decision to contract with certain facilities and not other facilities.”
So, the 569-bed jail sits empty.
It’s been used occasionally as an independent film or television show set, most notably a Japanese reality show, said Kristi Johnson, Fresno County associate film commissioner.
It was scouted for a couple of major studio features but didn’t make the cut, Johnson said.
Otherwise, city employees open and close the jail’s electronic doors, flush toilets and do routine maintenance. The city spends about $100,000 per year on maintenance from its $7.8 million general fund budget, Ramirez said.
Maintenance costs and payments for unemployment over the past three years push the total city tab up to $2.8 million, Ramirez said.
So, what’s the asking price for Claremont? It’s not set yet, but Ramirez said the building cost $12.4 million to build in 1991.
He said a private corrections company might be interested, or it could be used for storage or as a training facility for correctional officers, Ramirez said.
“We just can’t afford to keep it,” he said.