Oklahoma City Council to decide on new county jail location on East Grand

A decision on the site for the new Oklahoma County jail now rests in the hands of the Oklahoma City Council.

Oklahoma City's planning commission voted narrowly Thursday to send an approval recommendation to the City Council on a special use permit request for a new jail at 1901 E Grand.

At-large Commissioner Rusty LaForge put forward the recommendation, saying a future jail's location would draw opposition, no matter where it might be.

"Nobody wants it anywhere," LaForge said. "Oklahoma City is in the center of the county. This (location) is relatively in the center of the city. The experts (HOK, the jail project's lead architect) have looked at it and deemed it to be the best location. We can talk about the factors — the negatives and the pros — but the fact is, this came out the highest rated spot.

"We have got to get moving, have got to build a new jail."

LaForge's motion was was supported by Ward 5 Commissioner Bobby Newman, Ward 8 Commissioner Don Noble and Ward 3 Commissioner Jeremy Meek.

Camal Pennington, the Commission's Ward 7 representative and its chairman, voted against the motion, saying he felt like the city and county did not work together to find a location everyone could support.

"I am for putting the public first, and I think a more robust and transparent public process — and a greater collaboration between our city and county leaders — should have been done prior to this application being made," Pennington said.

"That having been said, I am adamantly opposed to a continuance because I think that a matter of this urgent concern is worthy of our elected officials to be immediately taking action.

"No neighbors in Del City, or in the great city of Oklahoma City, want to be subjected to having to wait any longer to find out what is going to happen with this situation."

Ward 2 Commissioner Janis Powers and Ward 4 Commissioner Mike Privett also voted against LaForge's approval recommendation. Two other commissioners, Nate Clair representing Ward 1 and Dan Govin representing Ward 6, did not attend the meeting.

Commissioners took their vote Thursday after watching presentations from David Box, the attorney representing owners of the land — Willowbrook Investments LLC and Garrett & Co. Resources — and HOK, the lead architect hired to design the jail.

Commissioners also were addressed by representatives of the City of Del City, Rick Cobb, superintendent of Midwest City-Del City Public Schools, criminal justice advocates and concerned neighbors.

Representatives of businesses located closest to the jail's location did not appear to either support or oppose the permit request.

The recommendation will be introduced to Oklahoma City's council when it meets later this month, but it won't actually vote on the special use permit request until it meets in mid-May.

HOK explains rationale for choosing 1901 E Grand location

Box made brief remarks on the behalf of Willowbrook and Garrett before introducing Curt Pardee, a principal with HOK, who told the planning commission it recommended the Grand Boulevard location as the best available spot for a jail after looking at 20 different sites.

HOK evaluated each site by ranking its size, topography (flat is better than hilly), soil quality, its number of owners, its purchase cost, the availability of water, sewer, electrical and natural gas services, its accessibility to nearby roads and if it had sufficient room, Pardee said.

To start with, it needed to be large enough to allow for the new jail to be designed and built out horizontally, eliminating the need for elevators to move detainees inside the new jail from one area to another. A horizontal design also would give detainees in each 56-person detention unit access to an outdoor area for recreation, plus allow room for an adjacent behavioral health center on the same land.

Design plans also currently call for including programming space where detainees could take classes or attend meetings to help them further their educations or work on improving their life skills and at least two courtrooms inside the building, where judges and court staffs could handle routine matters on-site instead of at the courthouse downtown.

A jail of that type, he said, also would take less time and less money to build, plus be less expensive to operate than the jail Oklahoma County has today.

Beyond that, the county needs room to expand the jail in the future as its population and potential detainee housing needs grow.

"This facility will be there a long time, so having proper planning is really important for that," Pardee said.

Jeff Bradley, the director of HOK's justice practice, told commissioners a single-story jail also is desirable because it can be designed to allow a maximum amount of natural lighting into the building.

Natural lighting, he and Pardee told them, would be beneficial for jail detainees, their guards and particularly to patients who agree to voluntarily be treated inside the adjacent behavioral health center.

Currently, county jails are the largest provider of mental health services in the nation, he remarked.

"Our overall goal is to make this (jail) a dramatically more humane environment," Bradley said.

Del City makes case a new jail's impact doesn't end at map's end

Del City Mayor Floyd Eason said he was struck that maps prepared both by the city's staff and the applicant ended with the border of Oklahoma City on Bryant Avenue.

Eason said there are 1,000 single family homes on Bryant's east side that has Del City residents his community seeks to protect.

"The developers end their world at Bryant, but that is where our world begins, and we are looking out for the citizens who live in that area — that's what we are trying to do," he said.

Scott Tatom, a member of Del City's city council, said the planning commission should delay hearing the request, asking whether Oklahoma County was conceptually trying to set up a transitional living center with its adjacent behavioral health center.

A transitional living center at that site would violate state restrictions designed to keep those away from schools, he argued. Further, he questioned why the county was not required to request a special use permit for the mental health center simultaneously, given that it technically would not be part of the jail.

"Decisions made today could impact our communities for many years and generations to come, so this decision should not be made in haste," Tatom said.

Kellie Wilbanks, assistant to Del City's city manager, told commissioners Oklahoma City shouldn't grant a special use permit until it is assured Oklahoma County officials won't make the same mistakes they did more than 30 years ago when they built the current jail.

Plus, she said the jail's current operations are concerning, and said she worried those wouldn't be solved by just a new building.

"To think we would naively approve something without having these things addressed is just crazy to me," Wilbanks said.

Blaine Nice, an attorney with Fellers Snider who has served as Del City's municipal judge for many years, told commissioners that while Box was correct in his summation a jail would be a good zoning fit for 1901 E Grand, he argued its impact would be pronounced because people who live nearby don't want it.

"This is not about the facility itself — it's great. It is about the location," Nice said.

Walter Jacques told commissioners he is a big supporter of public transportation, working with an alliance that helped bring street cars back to downtown Oklahoma City, and said he's tried to garner support in Del City for a regional transit authority that could bring rail transport to various communities around Oklahoma City.

Jacques noted that Del City and Midwest City recently dropped out of those discussions.

"I feel very strongly that placement of this jail by Oklahoma County on the border of Del City will create very bad blood and a lot of animosity, and I don't think the regional transit authority will ever see Midwest City and Del City come back into the fold as long as that jail is there."

Detainee releases concern nearby health services business, residents and planning commissioners

What would happen once a detainee is released from the jail was a constant concern brought up Thursday by Del City officials, a longtime planner who worked decades for Embark, the representative of a nonprofit who operates a half dozen care centers for developmentally disabled adults in Del City and planning commissioners themselves.

Larry Hopper, an urban planning consultant for both transit systems and land, told commissioners he would expect a bus route operating 16 hours a day between that site and downtown could cost between $300,000 and $500,000 annually.

"Who would pay those expenses?"

Commissioner Powers asked why the special use permit simply couldn't be modified to require that detainees be released downtown, instead of at the building itself.

Box explained to her he had been told that decision is made by the county's presiding judge and district attorney.

Powers said she recognized that the commission's job Thursday was to decide whether 1901 E Grand would be appropriate for a jail, not about how it functions.

"But we certainly do take cognizance of the fact this is very close to a residential area ... the idea of releasing detainees between 7 a.m. and midnight does not seem like a good idea to me this close to a residential area," she said.

This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Divided OKC planning commission recommends approval of controversial jail site