BROWN COUNTY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – As Brown County continues to ship inmates to neighboring county jails, the design work for the expansion of its jail is moving along.
There isn’t a timeline set for when construction work on the jail expansion could begin, but the first design renderings were shown to some county supervisors Wednesday night.
Architects designing Brown County’s jail addition, and a new medical examiner’s building, say their work is about 25 percent done.
“The early plans of what they showed looked good so far,” said Megan Borchardt, a Brown County Supervisor.
The jail expansion would add 28,000 square feet of space and beds for an additional 128 inmates.
“We have the flexibility in the pod for multiple security classifications,” said Cory Beyer, a Vice President for Venture Architects.
“We’ll have a dormitory, medium, and maximum security.”
The current cost projection is $14.1 million. That compares to $20 million, the amount earmarked for jail and mental health needs in 2017. That’s when the county voted to start collecting a half percent sales tax to pay for a variety of infrastructure needs.
The medical examiner’s building is 16,000 square feet and projected to cost $12 million. That’s $2 million more than 2017 projections.
Right now, Brown County has Dane County to take care of its medical examiner needs.
“This building will be able to give the state of the art services to perform autopsies,” said Jack Blume, a Vice President at Venture Architects.
“It allows them to become much more efficient with their services and it allows privacy and much more security for their staff.”
The main reason behind the jail expansion is overcrowding. The sheriff’s department has said its been shipping inmates to jails in Outagamie and Oconto Counties at a cost of $45 per day, per inmate.
In 2017, an average of 45.5 inmates were shipped out per day. Last year, the average went down to 30.5. This year, the average is 6.6, but county leaders warn not to read too much into that number because numbers tend to spike in summer months.
“We are spending a lot of money sending inmates out of the county,” said Pat Evans, a Brown County Supervisor.
“We’re sending bodies still to Madison for autopsies sometimes. So, we have to stay on that timetable of getting this done.”
But Borchardt tells FOX 11 she’s paying close attention to the numbers.
“If trends are going down and crime is not going up, the need for a new jail, we might not even need it.”
Design work on the jail expansion and medical examiner building is expected to take the rest of the year, according to the architects.
County officials say the amount collected from the half-percent sales tax is beating their projections and that building the jail addition and medical examiner building at the same time would save the county about $1 million.
