By Traci Chapman
Published on May 29, 2008

Officials have their “feet to the fire,” after state inspectors found health and safety violations May 7 at the Canadian County jail that could potentially cost county taxpayers thousands of dollars.

“Unfortunately, I knew this was coming — I said all along that if the new jail was rejected, the jail inspectors would bring on the heat — and here it is,” Sheriff Lewis Hawkins said Tuesday.

Voters rejected a sales tax increase May 13 that would have funded a proposed $24.8 million facility. If the measure had passed, it would have meant a sales tax increase of .35 of a cent for 15 years — the life of the loan on the proposed complex — then scale down to a .25 of a cent permanent increase.

Oklahoma Department of Health inspectors sent a notice of five violations to County Commissioners May 14, the day after the failed election. Commissioners reviewed the report at their weekly meeting Tuesday.

The jail was cited for the following deficiencies:

-The booking area, jail administration office and pod 137 — one of the inmate holding areas — had water on the floor from rain.
-The jail was over its legal capacity of 72 inmates on May 14, with 86 people being held at that time.
-The floors had standing water because of the leaking roof.
-Lighting in Pod 137 was “not sufficient.”
-The shower in Pod 137 was not working.

Don Garrison, director of the Jail Inspection Division of the Department of Health, said county officials have 10 days to respond to the violation notices and 60 days to correct the deficiencies.

“If 60 days have gone by, and they haven’t been corrected, the health department can issue an administrative compliance order, which basically means fines,” Garrison said. “The sheriff and commissioners then appear before an administrative law judge to explain why the violations haven’t been fixed.”

If the judge makes a finding in the health department’s favor, the county could be assessed fines totaling up to a maximum of $10,000 a day, Garrison said.

“They could go through an appeal process, but the bottom line is it could get expensive,” he said.

Garrison said if the problems remain unresolved, the county then has two “roads they can go down — and neither of them are pleasant.”

If it becomes apparent the county is not going to resolve the situation, he said, the health department can ask the attorney general to file a petition to close the jail, which has been done in four different instances throughout the state. The other option, he said, is worse.

“In two counties where the AG filed a petition — Le Flore and Grady counties — the federal government got involved,” he said. “You don’t want the feds involved. That can get even more expensive because they can require a county to do a lot of things in excess of what we require.”

The way to avoid fines and a potential closure of the county jail, Garrison said, is for officials to “get a new jail built, however they have to do it. If they are making an effort — which usually means building a new jail — the fines can stop accumulating, and a lot of times they will go away.”

District 2 Commissioner Don Young said the county could possibly fund some repairs out of its reserves — about $600,000 at this time, he said — but many of the problems “just aren’t fixable. We’re just going to have to do something to fix it up as best we can.”

Young said Commissioners would discuss the citation at their Monday meeting.

Water damage, an aged heating and air conditioning system and a building that “just wasn’t built right in the first place” have resulted in a structure “failing more by the day,” Hawkins said. Those problems, he said, could cost the county over $250,000 just to bring the facility up to state standards.

“Honestly, I don’t think that would do it because of all of the structural problems we have,” he said. “Short of just tearing the building down, I don’t know how we could fix all of those issues.”

Water damage is “the single biggest culprit,” Hawkins said. Concrete walls and floors have to be bleached “constantly,” he said, to keep mold at bay, and every time a pipe fails or needs to be repaired, the concrete must be chipped away.

“All of the piping is in concrete — the walls and floors are all concrete, and there is no easy access to the pipes, so we have to chip in around and try to fix the problems,” he said. “There are so many of them that we get one ‘fixed’ and the next springs up.”

The building’s overall design also causes repair “nightmares,” Hawkins said, because gas pipes are laid in some places directly on top of water piping.

Then, he said, there is the overcrowding issue.

“We’re still looking at about 100 people on any given day in a facility designed for 72. I don’t know how we’re going to address that,” Hawkins said. “That means more and more people are going to be released on recognizance bonds or something of that nature.”

Garrison said when the attorney general filed district court cases to close county jails in the past, voters “changed their minds” about sales tax increases.

“When they find out their jail might be closing, it tends to get citizens’ attention,” he said.