Stutsman: We’ll now have Dwight Dobberstein, Project Architect for Neumann Monson Architects and John Cain with Venture Architects.

Neumann Monson Project Architect, AIA, Dwight Dobberstein: Thanks, Sally. Follow up on what Pete said. Much of what our work has been based on is the report from Bill Garnos and Bob Carpenter pass out part of that report. We have and can make copies of the whole report if you want it. It’s a very good report, he’s very well qualified. Mr. Garnos was selected through an interview process. We had the Sheriff and the County Attorney and some of the Supervisors, we all interviewed a number of candidates and selected him. He was very well qualified, had been doing this for 10 years all over the country. Prior that, for 6 years, he was working on the governor’s staff in South Dakota and the Department of Corrections, and he got his degree there in criminal justice at the University, so we thought he was a very good person to do this analysis. Since then, now, he is not involved in the project, so it was a very key factor also, that he did not have an interest in the future of this. He has an unbiased opinion on how big this should be and what the need was. A couple of key graphs are shown right here, and they’re in the handout, I believe, I thought would be worth pointing out today. One is just a graphing of the number of inmates in the jail from 1993 to about the end of 1999. November was when he completed his report. The dark line in the middle is the average daily population and the line below is the low point, the day of the month that had the lowest number of inmates. The line at the top is the high point, the day of the month that had the highest number. That’s what he refers to as the peaking factor, that’s what Pete referred to. One day here we were at 127. That was the high up to that point, and since then I think we’ve hit 135 as the high peaking point. The dotted line here that’s horizontal is the number of beds available, and this point right here, about 1997, is where it went to total double bunking of all the cells. See, we have 92 beds available. That’s remained constant. After that, these people that you see here have been put on the floor, basically on mats. I think the average population here, at this point, was 94, a little over 94 (inaudible) and now, as Bob said, the average population this last month was 98.6. You can see within less than a year it’s already gone up 4 people. (Inaudible) information, this is what Mr. Garnos used to project to the year 2019, or 20 years in the future. He took 4 different models to do this projection. This is the actual, the dark line was the actual average daily population. You can see if you’ve just taken the last few years, the line can very well be much steeper. The concern we had was that he was underestimating the number of inmates in his projection. He looked at, taking the last, I think back to 1990, or 1993 to 1999, (inaudible) this higher trend line, trend line down here, 1981 to 1999 was a little more historical trend line. What he did was take the middle between those 2, and that was his projection for the year 2019. I think it’s important to point out that the number of inmates he’s projecting at that time was 185. Though he eventually projected a need for 255 beds, the actual number of inmates was 185. In fact, in the year 2004, he’s saying, well, the average number is 111. As you can see, we’re already, within not even a year, we’re close to hitting and going passed his projection. Like I said, 185, and what he does to project to the (inaudible) was he has a formula saying that you need about 25% of room, extra beds for that peaking factor, a year, for those weekends where you bring in extra people on football weekends for example. Then you need an additional 10% for classification, so you have room to move people around. Right now, the Sheriff can’t move people and isolate them. We can’t put them where they need to be. He’s got to take whatever beds available. You need to have some room to classify your prisoners and get them in the same cells with other, similar prisoners. Then, after that, I think the next step was to bring in a jail consultant. We did hire Venture architects, and John Cain will be speaking shortly. We did have an interview of 8 different firms. We looked nationally at firms and selected Venture architects. They had a very good reputation, won a lot of awards, and most impressively, they had a jail in Wisconsin, Rhinelander, that looked very close, very similar to what we thought would be the need, and we took a tour up there, and we’re very impressed with that facility. They took a look at Bill’s report and acknowledged it and verified, validated that report as being a good projection. We then looked at the site we had. As Pete said, we had a Site Selection Committee, and we looked at different sites. The site that ended up being recommended is right here, it’s on Melrose Avenue, about (inaudible) to the side as the County as you can get. It’s right on 218, I-380 and not far from I-80. Some discussion, a little discussion about whether that’s too far away from the center of town. Drove that this morning. Took me 9 minutes from the corner of Burlington and Clinton to get there. It’s like 3.6 miles. On the way back I came around this way, took 218 up to I-80, came back down into Old Capitol, took me 12 minutes. That was 10.6 miles. I think you can see that there’s very good access throughout the County. Much of the growth in the County is going in this direction. I heard rumor that North Liberty was the fastest growing town in Iowa. I’m not sure if that’s true, but at any rate, there’s lots of growth in this direction. This site was ideally located to serve that growth. We had criteria from the National Institute of Corrections, and that is what we use to assess the different sites. This is the criteria, and the Melrose site came out very favorably in all of these. The location is within the city, the site was large enough for the Sheriff’s office and for the Jail. It’s large enough for accommodating this all in one story. If we have our (inaudible), we’d rather have it on one story just because it’s more efficient. You don’t have to build an elevator. You don’t have to build the stairways. You can design it the way you want it to be most efficient. It’s big enough for on grade, it has enough room for parking. We’re looking at about 100 cars versus 45 that they already had here. It’s large enough to have a buffer zone around it, and there is a natural buffer zone already of trees, and there’s room for expansion. Land ownership, it is already owned by the County and it’s immediately ready for development, so that was a big plus. It provides secure access and it provides for separate sight and sound barrier from a different neighborhood around. It is compatible in existing zoning ordinance. It was already County land, it’s owned public already. Successful to the County courts, it’s in a 10 minute drive. That was one of their recommended requirements, that’s the case. Accessible to the (inaudible). I think it’s very important to realize that the Sheriff has lots of other responsibilities, especially in terms of an emergency response. This site really is much better for him to respond throughout the County in an emergency, because he’s right on the main highway system. Utilities to the site, so it has access to water and sewer lines, quick access to medical facilities. They’re even closer than the courthouse. This site is capable of future expansion and flexible building configurations, and I think that’s important because, again, we want to design this as efficiently as we can. If it’s flexible and we can put departments next to each other, that aids in staffing efficiency. Minimal adverse environmental impact. In other words, it’s not in the wetlands and has minimum impact on neighboring land uses. It has positive soil drainage, good soil bearing capacity, we hope. It hasn’t been done yet. We haven’t had any soil borings taken at this site yet, but our hope is, if we could use that site we only need to build a 2 story building, and we should be able to get by with spread footings out there. Normal site development cost that doesn’t require any special foundation, I guess I just mentioned that. No special water, utility line extension. Minimal special development issues. No demolition required out there, no negative impact on neighboring lands, again. Finally, it has the capacity for energy efficiency, if that’s part of the design, which we hope it will be, in that it’s got plenty of south exposure. Those are the criteria that we selected to pick this site and we think it’s a very good site. Here it is, here it’s shown in red here right along 218, and here’s Melrose Avenue, and here’s the existing jail site. You can see just the size of it, of the existing jail, to the size of what’s available out here. This is 53 acres, and granted, a good portion of it is Secondary Roads on the west side, so we’re talking about a space right here. It’s presently being farmed. It’s fairly level space here. Here’s Secondary Roads. There is, it’s hard to see, I’m sure, but there is a buffer of trees and a ravine right through here and over through here, and also a buffer of trees right here. This portion here was about 12 acres, and that’s about what they had up in Rhinelander for the facility there. In our studies of this, we see that that’s going to be big enough to fit and there’s room on this site for additional buildings and expansion.

Jordahl: How does that compare to the current Jail site?

Dobberstein: Well, the current Jail site is not even half of a city block. It’s, I think, 320 feet in this direction. 110 feet in this direction, so it’s not even a full block, and here, you can see this is the existing Jail, right now, and here is the property that is owned by the County. Harrison Street has been closed, so there’s a possibility of using that. But the program that’s being recommended is 125,000 square feet, and John will get into that, but basically, this building has 2 floors, a total of about 25,000 square feet. We’re looking at a building that’s 5 times larger than what’s here now. You can see that’s there’s just not enough room to put a building that big on this side without some additional land. We did try very hard to work at a design that would fit on this side. I think we had some wild ideas. One time we looked at 5 story towers at either end, and they just didn’t make any sense. Traditionally, the jail has always been close to the Courthouse, and so that was our first push, to try to study this site to see if it would work. Our final conclusion was that it just didn’t work. This building is not designed to go up. It has spread footings. The roof load is designed, structurally, only for about snow loads, 40 pounds a square foot, and not designed for vertical expansion at all. The building was designed for a little bit of horizontal expansion here, but that is not going to solve the problem. On the second floor, all the support spaces are landlocked, so to speak, inside the building. There’s no expansion space available for all the services that are needed for the jail. You’ll see that as you go up and take the tour later on. I don’t want to dwell on that, but I just wanted to point out that this site was (inaudible). There’s no room for future expansion, as Pete said. It just seemed like an uphill battle all the way. That is why the Committee recommended the site on Melrose. In the interest of time, I see we’re moving on, I think I’ll have John Cain now come up and talk a little bit more about the building design and program and cost estimates for the new building.

Venture Architects Representative John Cain: Does everyone have a copy of this handout? The numbers, particularly for those of you who are in the back, (inaudible). My name’s John Cain. I’m a principal with a firm called Venture Architects out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Our work is principally in the justice arena. We do a lot of work in the designing of both County jails as well as state prison facilities, and, in fact, have been involved in the 2 most recent state prisons here in Iowa, both in Newton as well as the Fort Dodge facilities. We are familiar with a lot of the Iowa issues. What I want to do, and I’ll try to keep my comments fairly brief, but I think there are some important things that I need to cover none the less. I know we want to make sure there’s time to go on the tour. I want to cover very briefly some of the numbers related to the project, the size of the facility, and some of the elements that will be in it. I want to talk a little bit about the design of new jail facilities and the concepts that are going to be incorporated into Johnson County’s project. I also want to quickly go over the budget numbers. A lot of that information is in the handout that you can see. I will not go into a lot of the detail. I think if you have questions I’d be happy to answer them for you as we go along. So with that, very quickly, if you look at the first page after the cover, it outlines in broad terms what is included in this project. The total size, as you see at the bottom, is roughly 123,000 gross square feet. It’s made up of the jail at roughly 69,000 square feet, or 56%. The Sheriff’s Department, at 41,000, or 34%. There are other components that will be part of the project, including the public lobby. There will be a courtroom facility in the building. Civil defense will be located here, and then all the major maintenance, boilers, air handling equipment, as well as facility support is included in that roughly 13,000 square feet as well. Very quickly, in the jail, as has been mentioned, it’s a 256 bed facility. It will be designed around a concept called podular design, which I’ll show you a model very quickly in a minute. There will be 3 pods that make up this building. Pod A, which will be of 100 beds, is dormitory construction. The beds that will be in there will be bunk beds as well as tables, but it’s a dorm. It’s like one big room, or a series of rooms that have a number of beds in them. That pod, Pod A, is for minimum classification inmates. Pod B, 60 cells, 100 beds, is for medium and maximum classification. Some of those beds, some of those cells, will be single occupied, some of them will be double occupied to get us up to the 100 bed capacity. Finally, Pod C, which is a 33 cell and 56 bed pod, is for the special needs population. Those that can not live in these other 2 populations and live with those inmates who are there. There are special health needs that are required of some of the population, mental health needs as well, in particular, that. So that represents the housing portion. The intake release, or the booking area, is where all the inmates that come to the facility as well as leave are processed. There’s inmate property storage there, the whole booking process occurs there. Included in that area, we’re providing the series of rooms enough seating for 62 short term arrestees. These would be people who would never be dressed out and spend time in the housing portion of the project. These are going to be your short time, maybe your DWI offenders who are coming in the evening, stay overnight, have an initial hearing in the morning and are gone. That’s why we have that, so they don’t even have to get into the jail housing portion. To run the facility, there are programs and activities for the inmates. There will be exercise areas in the housing pods, classrooms for various types of inmate programs and classes. AOTA, high school equivalency courses. There will be visiting in each of the housing pods, both contact visiting as well as non-contact, with a piece of glass between the inmate and the family member or an attorney. There is a work release program that will be incorporated in this project. A number of the inmates are assigned by the courts to a work release program, and they will be housed here. We need to provide services for them. Finally, the facility support for the entire building, jail portion, administration, food, laundry, and staff will all be at this site as well. The Sheriff’s Department includes Sheriff’s administration, the detectives patrol, communications, 911. Records, both for the Sheriff as well as the jail will be in this facility. There’s the need for staff training, both classrooms as well as exercise areas, and that’s been provided. There are locker facilities for the staff as well, and then finally, fleet operations, which is a large garage, will be sized to accommodate 40 of the Sheriff’s departmental vehicles of various sizes, as well as space for evidence storage, 10 vehicles that are being housed by the County and used as evidence in various court cases. I’ve already covered the other portions, and so this gives you a quick overview of what’s included. I have also added at the bottom a little clarification. We understand that there’ve been some discussions here in the County as to how many beds and cells are in the present jail as it relates to the proposed, and I want to clarify that. In the existing jail there are 46 cells. These are numbers that you’ve seen already today and discussed. With the double bunking that has been allowed by the State in recent years takes us up to 92 beds. The proposed jail will consist of 93 cells, 256 beds. Out of that 256, 156 will be what we call cell beds. There are those 100 dormitory beds as well, and that makes up the 256. That’s a brief overview of the program. There is another page which I will not go through today, but it gives you a breakdown by square footage of all the various components that make up that building program. If we talk now about the building design itself, and if I use this site plan that Dwight had shown a minute ago…

Thompson: Do you want me to hold it?

Cain: Yes, why don’t you, Carol? That would be great. Again, you know, this is Melrose, this is 218. This is Melrose here, this is 218. The parcel and the building that you’re looking at here and the colors fits right into this area here. That’s the flat portion of the site. There is a ravine that runs through here. The building, as you saw from the program, is made up of 3 components. There is the Sheriff’s Department, which is in the yellow. There is the jail or the housing, which is the orange, and these are the 3 housing pods. The support area, in green, is all the booking, food and laundry services for the jail. The main entrance comes off of Melrose, here, and this is what the public will see. All along this side will be large amounts of glass because there are offices and other public or Sheriff related functions that are here. The large fleet maintenance, garage, will be towards the back and away from the front of the building. We’ve located or oriented the building in such a way so that the support and where the truck areas are are to the back. We have trees here. The ravine here conceals that portion, here, which is the jail, or the housing part. It would be our intent to retain as much of the landscaping over here as is possible so that the building can be screened from both the highway and residential areas across the highway to the east. But clearly, the front of the building here is what the public will see and that’s where…that public presence and the importance and the character of the building will be defined. People have asked us what this building might look like. That we have not determined, but if I use for a comparison the facility which the Sheriff and Dwight and others toured up in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and this is the Oneida County Law Enforcement Center, this is the front of that building. The jail area is off to the right here. The Sheriff’s Department to the left with the windows. This is the lobby area here. There’s also a courtroom in that facility as well. As you can see, law enforcement centers do not have to look like prisons, but they in fact can be quite attractive buildings. They do have a civic presence and an important investment in the part of any county building a facility like this. Expansion has been a critical consideration, and obviously, one of the major drivers in determining that this is the site to be built on. This next board illustrates how that future expansion would occur. Housing would continue towards the west with additional housing pods. Expansion, likewise, would occur to the west and then we would place those parking lots here, far enough to the east so that any expansion that would be required of the Sheriff’s Department could occur there as well. Again, we make the point, and it’s a very important point, that consideration of this site is driven, in large part, by creating an efficient plan. That plan begins as a one level construction and continues as a one level construction, so we don’t have the inefficiencies of elevators, that inmates have to move up and down every single time, or if there’s an event in the jail where there’s an emergency, and Sheriff have to be summoned and dispatched to different parts of the building. They’re not going up and down stairs or having to take elevators. All of those things are very important considerations. Just looking at the clock. The design of the building itself I want to go into just very briefly. I want to illustrate the discussion about podular design. Follow the drawing you just saw, you’ll know that this is the Sheriff’s Department here, the main entrance, fleet operations, the kitchen, laundry, booking area to the back. These are the 3 housing pods. If I can sneak past Carol here. I will use this model, and I think it helps to illustrate what we’re talking about relative to this podular design. This happens to be Oneida County, but concepts still apply. There are 2 housing pods here. This is a dorm pod, this is a cell pod. At the center of each one is an officer station that’s in the center and controls all the doors and sees directly into each of the housing areas. This would be the Pod A similar to that. It’s dormitory construction. Each area is quite large. It is subdivided so that of that 100 bed population, you’re organizing and classifying according to sex, male and female, as well as, you know, somebody in this housing pod may not really be a good friend of somebody that’s over there, and you want to be able to classify and separate them so you don’t have assaults, inmates on inmates or inmates on staff. That’s the dorm pod. It’s a one story piece. The cell pod is a 2 level design. There are cells on the upper floor, the lower floor, the day room area here. This would be typical of Pod B or Pod C, where, again, you’re separating inmates by classification, by charges, by behavioral considerations, which is a whole elaborate process that is gone through at the time of the booking. That’s a quick model of what that looks like. In picture form, how that translates into a building, and again, these are samples, or examples of that type of construction. This might be that housing dorm. A little dusty. This is that officer’s station. You can even, for those of you who are in the back, can see that you can actually pick out the bunk beds and the tables. You can not do that in jail, which you’ll see upstairs. The whole idea is that you have an officer in a single control center who can literally spin around on that chair and see nearly everything that’s happening in that housing pod. This is that dormitory design. The celled pod might look something like this. Here’s an officer who is sitting at a control center, has all the door controls, can see, again, even in the back you can see the green and the orange. These are cell doors, these are day rooms in front and cells to the behind. This is surrounding him. This is a small jail in northern Wisconsin but the concept still applies. This is what one of those cell areas looks like. This is a modern jail. There are no bars. You see a lot of glass. We’ve taken away a lot of that stigma that has existed for centuries about jail design. They’re safe and they’re humane. This is where the inmates would take their meals, this is where they might run some of the programs. This is a maximum security cell. These are the cell doors, you can see the bunk beds behind, both on the first floor as well as the upper floor. Yes?

Iowa City City Council Member Irvin Pfab: How much natural lighting is there available in most of those cells?

Cain: The natural lighting that’s brought in comes through very large sky lights that are right here, which bring natural light both into the day room area as well as into the cells. We believe that that natural light really improves the quality of what’s going on in here as opposed to other buildings you might see where it’s all fluorescent or metal (inaudible), and it’s very gray and it’s very dark. We can still place windows in the cells on the outside if the County so chose to do that. That can be done. We have seen a preference in a lot of counties moving away from individual windows in the cells, however, preferably being able to open up the glass to the front of the cell and get natural light that way, as well as improve visibility. Inmates can get in trouble, and particularly if you’ve got cells that are double bunked. I think there’s a lot of safety issues when you’ve got an officer who can see directly into these areas. Now let me go over the numbers, and then I think I’ll be finished. The next page that you see is our preliminary budget for the project. The total project budget is $20,282,000. That’s at the bottom, here. It’s broken up into 3 major areas. A and B are capital costs. This is bricks and mortal. Site development, $450,000, includes grading on the site, utility extensions that are required, all the parking, the drives, the landscaping. Building construction is $16,086,000, of which the jail is roughly $11.2 million, the Sheriff’s Department is $4 million. Those other areas, lobby, courtroom, civil defense, almost $800,000. For the total construction budget, bricks and mortal, of roughly $16.5 million. There are other costs associated with the project at $3.746 million. Some of the larger pieces, there are AE fees, architectural engineering, professional services fees at roughly $1.1 million. There are movable furniture and furnishings, $300,000. There is radio dispatch equipment at $600,000, so there’s a whole variety of different things that make up the other costs, but have to be totaled into the total project budget. I think with that in mind, for the sake of saving time, I think I’m finished right now.

Stutsman: All right, thank you, John.

(Continued in Part 3)