BROWN COUNTY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – Brown County supervisors are beginning to weigh in on whether the county should build a juvenile detention facility.
The county’s health and human services committee agreed Wednesday night that a resolution should be drafted to gauge the full county board’s feelings on the proposal.
The detention center would help take in some of the youth inmates from Lincoln Hills and Copper Lakes when those centers close, which is currently scheduled to happen in July of 2021.
Brown County’s proposal is $43 million. That is more than half of the $80 million the state has to award counties. The money would cover 95 percent of the construction costs for new juvenile detention centers.
Racine, Milwaukee, and Dane are the other counties vying for part of the state’s grant money.
If Brown County gets the go-ahead from the state to put a new juvenile detention center on its jail campus, county supervisors say taxpayers better not end up shouldering its annual expenses.
“95% of the funding for the building itself comes from the state,” said Pat Evans, a county supervisor.
“I get that, but that $7 million annually, we have to be very careful because that’s a lot of out of county residents so to speak, inmates, that we’re going to be taking care of.”
Brown County projects annual operating costs to be $7.2 million.
21 other counties could send their youth offenders to the facility.
The county plans to charge those counties between $550 and $685 per day, per inmate.
County officials say those projections are based off state statistics and ensure the project makes fiscal sense for taxpayers.
“We should be voted down if there is a potential we’ll have to come up with $7 million a year in operating costs,” said Kevin Brennan, Manager of Children, Youth, and Families at the Brown County Human Services Department. “None of us want to take on any kind of liability this way.”
Supervisors say they’d like to know what the alternative would cost, which would be sending Brown County juvenile offenders to one of the other counties vying for a juvenile center.
“I can tell you the state correctional rate will be in 2021, $615 a day,” said Erik Pritzl, Executive Director of Brown County’s Health and Human Services Department.
“I can’t tell you right now that those other counties have put forward a rate for us that we could look at.”
Brennan tells FOX 11 it is also important to look at the plan beyond dollars and cents.
“You can focus on the daily rate, but their total stay will be much less than if we sent them away to Lincoln Hills where they could be there for a year. It would be about better quality, doing it right the first time.”
The hope is a resolution to support the plan will be ready for the full county board to vote on in September.
The county-run facilities, like the one Brown County, has proposed, are different than the type-1 facilities the state has planned.
In March, Governor Tony Evers announced those detention centers would be built in Milwaukee and Hortonia, which is just south of New London. Those facilities would be for more serious juvenile offenders.
The state also has $56 million it plans to use to expand the existing Mendota Juvenile Center in Madison, which focuses more on mental health.
