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EDINBURG — One year after the Hidalgo County Commissioners’ Court inked a 50-year lease of the shuttered Willacy County jail, officials have announced projections that the facility will again be ready to house inmates by Jan. 15, 2024.
But questions linger over whether the county will be able to meet that target date as contractors continue working on a laundry list of repairs and renovations, as well as what the total price tag that taxpayers will pay for the county to fix, then operate the jail.
Hidalgo County leased the facility last November, about seven months after Willacy County closed the county-owned, but privately run jail due to federal policy changes regarding privately operated prisons.
Leaders here hoped the Willacy jail could serve as the solution to a yearslong jail overcrowding problem that has sparked warnings from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, or TCJS, which regulates Texas jail facilities.
The issue has forced Hidalgo County to spend millions of dollars each year to house inmates at other jails, including in Starr and Brooks counties.
In the months since the commission approved of the lease, they have gone on to hire contractors to inspect the facility, bring it up to spec, and to serve as the third-party administrators of the jail’s day-to-day operations.
HIRING CONTRACTORS
Hidalgo County approved of the $3 million per year lease on Nov. 1, 2022, according to meeting minutes.
Just two weeks later, the county hired Halff Associates for a sum of $205,000 to serve as on-call engineers for the facility.
Two weeks after that, on Nov. 29, 2022, the county began looking for a firm to serve as third-party administrators who would be responsible for overseeing the inmates day-to-day.
The county eventually found a company to do just that — LaSalle Corrections, a for-profit prison company headquartered in Louisiana.
On April 4, the county and the company agreed to an eight-year contract wherein LaSalle would manage the housing of up to 450 inmates at the Willacy jail for a set cost — one that will increase each year.
In the event that Hidalgo County exceeds that 450 inmate population, LaSalle will charge an additional $75 per day per inmate up to a census of 568 inmates, according to a copy of the contract.
The county agreed to pay LaSalle $13.9 million for the first year of the contract, which had an effective date of April 1, 2023.
Hidalgo County will owe the company more than $14.5 million for year two, $15.3 million in year three, $16 million in year four, and so on.
TALLYING IT UP
Hidalgo County has spent about $9.9 million on the Willacy jail thus far in 2023, according to Carlos Sanchez, the county’s director of public affairs.
Sanchez provided The Monitor with a document that shows how the county has spent the $19.8 million it budgeted for the jail this year.
The chart shows that Hidalgo County spent just over $7 million on a line item listed as, “Willacy Co Jail – Other Srv.”
Another line item listed as “Willacy Co Jail – Other” showed that just over $9.2 million had been allocated to that fund, but zero dollars had been spent.
Other line items show smaller sums spent on things like natural gas and electricity.
In late-September, when county officials contemplated the 2024 fiscal budget, they ultimately approved a $17.6 million appropriation for the Willacy County jail. The county’s fiscal year begins on Jan. 1.
That appropriation is reflected in the chart Sanchez provided to the newspaper under a column marked “2024 Estimated Expenditures.”
That column includes a $14 million allocation for the “Other Srv” line item.
But, on the whole, the figures do not appear to cleanly line up with expenditures the county has already made on the facility.
For instance, none of the 2023 line items amount to the $13.9 million sum that the county agreed to pay LaSalle Corrections for the first year of its contract.
Nor do any of the 2024 line items appear to reflect the more than $14.5 million contract rate that the county will owe LaSalle beginning on April 1, 2024.
When asked, Sanchez was unsure what was included in those “Other” and “Other Srv” expenditures — whether or not those figures represent money the county has committed to repairing the jail, or if any of those amounts represented lease and administration costs.
RENOVATIONS CONTINUE
The county has invested substantial funds to try to bring the jail back to an occupiable condition.
Though the commissioners court hired LaSalle Corrections in early-April, the jail was nowhere near ready to accept prisoners then.
It wasn’t until May 30 that officials hired Noble Texas Builders, of La Feria, to take on the gargantuan task of renovating the jail.
The company has since submitted three requests for payment detailing how much of the work it has accomplished thus far.
Officials approved Noble’s most recent request for payment during a commissioners court meeting this Tuesday.
In the four-page application for payment, Noble states that it had completed approximately 25% of its work as of Sept. 25, expending more than half-a-million dollars of its $2.3 million contract.
A line-item log of that work includes more than $50,000 in masonry labor and materials, $140,000 for plumbing, about $50,000 for electrical work and more.
But Noble still has 75% of the work yet to complete while three major holidays loom between now and the county’s Jan. 15, 2024 target date.
