The Warren County Board has received a third cost estimate to review on constructing a new jail in the county informs Building and Grounds Committee Chairman Sean Cavanaugh:
“We had three quotes with the floor plan. One, is a jail that is its’ own structure not attached to anything or an existing building with a courtroom attached to it and that was a spell over $10 million for a 50 bed jail. A 50 person jail with no courtroom attached I think was $9.6 million and if we were to build onto another facility locally, one that we were eyeballing, that was the most expensive of them all and that does not include purchasing the building on top of that, which would be considerably more. The pandemic slowed down the process of looking at the jail. We had met with bonding authorities and different groups to further explore our options and obviously when the pandemic hit, it changed everything. It changed projections of sales tax dollars and so forth. We had to play the waiting game to see how those numbers shook out so we can effectively plan for the future to see if it is worth proceeding with the jail or making an agreement with another county or whatnot. So we do have three floor plans to look at,” Cavanaugh says.
