Sacramento County may spend almost $1 billion on new annex at the downtown jail. Here’s why
The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors will decide Tuesday afternoon whether to authorize a $654 million mental health annex at the downtown jail and reimburse itself for expenditures of up to nearly $1 billion for the project.
In December, county leaders voted to approve the jail mental health annex at a projected cost of $450 million.
Ken Casparis, a public information officer for the county, said the cost of the project had gone up by $200 million because the $450 million approved in December was for construction, and the $654 million figure is “based on the current planned project scope, duration and estimating for contingencies, such as market escalation and other unknown factors.” He said the larger number also includes furniture, equipment, permitting, utility, staff and consultant costs.
The county may agree to reimburse itself for $925 million — nearly $1 billion — which includes potential future debt obligations. In recommending the resolution, county staff wrote to the board that that large sum “includes a not-to-exceed amount that is greater than the anticipated actual issuance and includes non-project costs such as costs of issuance, capitalized interest, bond insurance, a fully funded reserve fund, and other bond related expenses.”
If passed, the resolution would not require the county to spend close to $1 billion on the project, but it would give officials the option to do so.
At the Tuesday board meeting, the matter is scheduled for discussion at 2:30 p.m. Members of the public will be allowed to comment, and local mental health providers and advocates have said they will protest the resolution. In a meeting last year, critics of the proposal urged the board to focus on reducing the jail population instead of building a new annex.
Supervisor Phil Serna, whose district covers much of the city of Sacramento, voted against the mental health annex in December. At the time, he noted that the price of the new building was “roughly five times our annual parks budget.”
Why spend millions on a mental health annex at the jail?
Because so many people incarcerated in the jail have mental health diagnoses, the Sacramento County Main Jail has become one of the county’s largest mental health service providers.
And the county is under pressure to improve conditions at the I Street facility because of the a lawsuit that led to the Mays Consent Decree. Three years ago, the county settled a class action lawsuit brought by people incarcerated in the county jails.
The lead plaintiff in that case, Lorenzo Mays, spent eight years in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs described inhumane conditions in the jail, including understaffing and overcrowding that led to dangerous situations and a dire lack of adequate health care services.
Previous Sacramento Bee reporting revealed that the jail put people with serious mental illness into solitary confinement, seeing no alternative because of overcrowding. Studies have shown that isolation tends to worsen mental health problems, and a study in Forensic Science International found that solitary confinement increases suicide risk.
If conditions do not improve, a court could appoint a receiver to make decisions for the board to bring the jail into compliance with the federal consent decree.
As part of the county’s response to the Mays Consent Decree, a majority of supervisors previously voted to build a new mental health annex at the I Street facility.
An earlier analysis by the county said that more than half of people housed in the jail have a mental health diagnosis and receive some kind of treatment while incarcerated. Critics of the jail expansion have said that many of those people should not be incarcerated, but rather receiving treatment in a therapeutic setting.
