By Julia Wallace
Laredo Morning Times, Texas
In less than a month, Webb County voters will decide if they want to bump up their property taxes to pay for a new $125 million jail and law enforcement facility.
To ramp up support for the bond project, the Webb County Public Safety specific purpose committee held a news conference outside the county courthouse Thursday morning. Commissioner Jesse Gonzalez, in his capacity as a reserve sheriff’s deputy; Sheriff’s Office Chief Federico Garza, in his capacity as a taxpayer; and former Laredo Mayor Betty Flores all encouraged the crowd to vote “yes” on Proposition A.
The new facility would include a jail house with 738 beds, a vehicle maintenance building, a firing range, a training center, the Sheriff’s Office headquarters and more.
The current jail, which was built downtown in 1986, is outdated and at capacity, and the Sheriff’s Office is having to house inmates in other counties for a cost of $800,000 a year, Gonzalez noted.
Plus, the Sheriff’s Office’s buildings are all over the city -- they need a proper headquarters, Flores said.
“We cannot put a price on public safety,” she said. "... Please, for the love of god, go vote for Proposition A.”
If the bond passes, property owners would be paying an additional 4.41 percent in taxes for 25 years, although this number could drop. On top of what they already give to the county, property owners would be paying:
- $44.08 a year for a $100,000 home
- $66.12 a year for a $150,000 home, Laredo’s median home cost
- $88.16 a year for a $200,000 home
- $132.24 a year for a $300,000 home
After the news conference, Sheriff Martin Cuellar spoke to LMT about some of the concerns that have arisen in the public sphere regarding the planned law enforcement center.
The $125 million bond will only be spent on buying the land for the facility, architect and engineering fees, new construction and improvements to the current jail -- maintenance and operation costs will be additional.
Cuellar said the operation costs will not change much. If the number of prisoners remains the same, for instance, then they would not need to hire more deputies to work in the jail. They would hire around two people to work in the vehicle maintenance building, and the firing range, for instance, would be self-sufficient, Cuellar said.
He was supposed to meet with the Texas Jail Commission on Monday to determine exactly how many deputies would need to work in the jail, based on current design plans. However, a member of the Commissioners Court was meant to attend as well, and they were unable to go due to a court hearing they had this week, so the meeting was rescheduled.
As far as maintenance costs, there will be far fewer at the new facility than there are at the current jail, said Colin Strother, a political strategist who is directing the public education campaign on the jail for Webb County.
is also a senior adviser for U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, the sheriff’s brother.
The Sheriff’s Office has been using hundreds of thousands of dollars in forfeiture funds every year to improve and maintain the current jail, Strother said.
“So we’re spending the money to try to keep something running that should have been put out of its misery a long time ago. It’s like an old car. You can put it in the shop every week to keep it running, but at the end of the day it might be cheaper to just get a new one,” he said.
If the bond passes, $6 million is proposed to go toward a renovation of the current jail and the underground tunnel that connects it to the courthouses. That way, the county will be able to rent out those beds to federal law enforcement agencies to house their inmates, Cuellar said.
Currently, the feds don’t often inquire about available space at the jail because they know there’s already a population problem, Cuellar said. However he is confident they will come knocking if the county vacates the current jail.
“If we had a place, then we would be lobbying and getting more federal prisoners,” Cuellar said.
Strother said he sees this as a great revenue opportunity for Webb County. If they can fill up the current 570-bed jail with federal inmates at a cost of $60 a day, the county could generate about $12.7 million a year, he said.
Over the 25-year life of this bond, the county has the potential to make enough money housing federal inmates to pay back the $125 million, plus the county’s existing $76 million in debt, Strother said.
“So the (return on investment) on this, there’s nothing the county could do that’s comparable,” he said. “Literally this investment pays for itself and the balance of the county’s $76 million debt in 25 years.”
Nationwide, the number of people in state and federal prisons has been on a steady rise for decades. However, according to data collected by the Sentencing Project, an advocacy center working to reduce incarceration in the U.S., these numbers have been dropping slightly since around 2010.
Cuellar is not worried about not being able to fill beds at the new jail. They already have to send offenders to be housed in Zapata and Maverick counties because they cannot fit at the current jail, he said.
“I don’t really think that we will be lacking prisoners at this point,” Cuellar said.
Commissioner Gonzalez, again, speaking as a reserve sheriff’s deputy, said he just wants the community to feel secure and safe.
“We don’t just want to cut (offenders) lose and say, ‘we don’t have space,’ or say, ‘we can’t accept you right now because of population,’” he said.
When he started working for the jail in 2004, it was already obsolete and antiquated, Gonzalez said.
“Everything is moving forward, and the jail’s not. We can’t stay at this level anymore.”
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(c)2017 the Laredo Morning Times (Laredo, Texas)