Stutsman: Tony, if you would talk a little bit about the financing part of it?

Roetlin: My name’s Tony Roetlin. I’m with Springsted Associates. I’m the Financial Advisor that’s been retained on this project by Johnson County. We’re based out of Des Moines and St. Paul, Twin Cities. As I look at this project and looked at some of the work the Committee did, looked at some of the projections from the consultant, Mr. Garnos, I came to the conclusion, that I’ll humbly submit, that the County and its taxpayers are going to have to pay for increasing inmate populations in one way or another. Either through housing them out of County on a per diem basis and transporting them, or through building another facility, a replacement facility. I have here a couple of charts, both of which have been present in prior public meetings. This is a chart that outlines over the next 10 years, projects the cost to house prisoners out of county. It’s based on the Garnos study. Here, much earlier in the process. Along the bottom line you see the annual cost, starting somewhere around $600,000 and climbing every year. Basically, that takes a slice of the inmate population that is projected to have to be housed out of county should the state come in and require that, and takes it out of the conservative, in all of our opinions, $65 a day with no allotment for transportation costs. This is a chart that was introduced earlier in the process. As I said, the bottom line is the annual cost. The top line is cumulative cost. You can see that very quickly, relatively quickly when you’re thinking of a program or an ongoing facility sense, it approaches $15 million, which is 3 quarters of the cost of a new facility that we’re talking about here. Later in, excuse me, the process as we explored financing options, this chart was introduced, and jumping ahead of myself slightly, but the blue line that’s horizontal represents the annual cost of a bond issue, and again, this was before the final decision was made on the ballot. A $20 million bond issue, so, $20.3 million, the whole cost of the jail, as is currently planned. Annual, give or take, $2 million a year. The red line that rises is the recasting of the projections I just showed you a moment ago, which includes a minor conservative transportation cost. It’s $10 per inmate per day cost, coming out of an Iowa State University study that deals with transportation of prisoners to neighboring County facilities. The use of the term neighboring in that study, I think, is what allows me to say that the estimate is conservative. This term goes out 20 years as opposed to the prior chart which went 10. The important thing, I think, to take away from this is that the red line, the cost to house prisoners outside the County, rises and goes into the future. The blue line stops right where it’s at, or before, should the bond issue used to finance the facility like this be repaid early. Again, you’ve got a limited, defined set of costs versus one that hard to get a handle on the upside range of, and they go on for quite some time. The projected cost of housing prisoners out of County, that red line can be recast in terms of the impact on a $100,000 homeowner, and that’s market value, not taxable value. It’s market value in Johnson County, regardless of whether it’s in the city or in the country, to be about $16 early on and rise quickly to about $35. I think you heard Pete Hayek mention those figures earlier. Those are just a recasting of the red line, and sort of terms there relate to most people in the County. Stepping back a moment from the specifics of this side of the issue, the Board of Supervisors went through a process with my firm where they looked at the various options to finance a facility like this. What were the options, and what their impact might be on the taxpayers of the County. At the end of that process, as we looked at all the options, on August 24, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to place a general obligation bond ballot question on the November 7 election ballot for $19 million of GO bonds to be issued to finance the bulk a $20.3 million project, with $1.3 million coming from the capital budgeting exercise that the County went through that Miss Stutsman detailed at the outset of a meeting. Using those Capital Projects monies, the cash on hand, so to speak, has saved, should the project go forward in its current form, about $2 million for County property taxpayers. That’s about $40 for a $100,000, over the next 20 years. When you add all those 40s together you start talking about real money. The impact of a $19 million jail bond issue on County taxpayers, I think some of these numbers have been used in prior meetings as well, and again this is market value, not taxable value, is about $29 for $100,000 anywhere in the County, and that’s per year. One important thing to note about this project, and it’s sort of a quirk of Iowa law as it applies to counties and GO bonding, is that in the ballot, you have to state what the total project cost will be, not just what you’re borrowing. That binds you to a ceiling on that project. In this particular instance, and it’s different for cities and schools, frankly, when you vote on those types of questions, the County residents can be assured that that will be the total cost of the project, maybe less. If the project comes in under the estimates, that’s all that’s perfectly acceptable, that’s great, it’s a win-win. But should there be additional cost overruns, another vote would be required just like this one. 60% approval of those expenditures regardless of the source, even if the County had cash on hand. I think that’s an important thing to think about in terms of a project this large. It really puts a cap on spending. As I said, the project could cost less. It could come in under budget, and should that happen, should not all $19 million or $1.3 million from the 2 different sources, be necessary? Funds could be used to repay the bond issue early, or a slice of the bond issue, and that’s something that local governmental units often do when they do have surplus project funds. Another distinction I think that people should bear in mind is that the project fund generated by the $19 million bond issue can not be used for other projects. It must be used on this project. There’s a million left over. The County can’t simply go spend it somewhere else, and I think that generates a high level of confidence along with all the other things programmatically and governmentally that the County does, but specifically, on a question like this, I think that often generates a high degree of public confidence, when people really understand it. There are 2 revenue sources that don’t get talked about a lot, and I think they bear mention on this project, revenue sources for this project. One of them is the rental of space, or capacity, in a new facility to jurisdictions outside the County that need to do exactly what Johnson County might need to do in a couple years should this facility not be available, that need to ship prisoners elsewhere. We’ve heard estimates of $65 per diem for certain types of inmates, and I think that could be a revenue source that could be used to retire (inaudible), should it materialize. I think we’ve seen examples of other counties like Black Hawk County who have done that successfully. Another of those 2 sources of revenue that haven’t really been discussed in a public forum a lot is the current facility that we’re standing in right now. This facility, should the County choose to do so, could be sold for some amount of funds in the future. It could also be used to ease space needs for other programs elsewhere in the County, be it a couple blocks or a couple miles away. I think there’s a lot of flexibility. I’m not an architect or an engineer, but I’m speculating there’s a lot of flexibility to this building and it could be used, there is a value to it, and it could ease some other needs in the County. That’s really all I’ve got on the financing front. Again, this ballot question is the result of an in depth exploration of financing options that County has for this facility, and I’ll turn it over to the front of the room, back to the Chairperson.

Stutsman: All right. Thank you, Tony. Bob, were you planning for jail tours to start at a specific time?

Carpenter: Well, as soon as we’re done here we’ll get started.

Stutsman: OK. The next item on the agenda is inquiries, so we would like to open it up to people if they have specific questions about any of the information that’s been presented today. One thing I would ask, that for the benefit of the auditor, who is taping this meeting, if you could, identify yourself with your name and address. Carol, do you have a question?

Carol DeProsse: My name is Carol De Prosse and I’m from Lone Tree, Iowa. I would like to state that I’ve had a tour of the jail and I’ve had a 2 hour meeting with Sheriff Carpenter that was a very pleasant and engaging meeting. I do believe that something needs to be done with this present facility and I am 100% opposed to the plans put forth by the Committee. But rather than today address some of my arguments about specific aspects, I’d like to just ask, Mr. Hayek, how were the meetings of the Jail Overcrowding Study Committee made known to the public, when they were occurring, and…

Hayek: We comply with the open meetings notice requirements. You’d have to ask the secretary.

Carpenter: They were posted on the web, there was always… We had a web site. (Inaudible) meetings (inaudible).

De Prosse: How was the first meeting advertised?

Carpenter: In the public, at the Courthouse, our lobby and the Administration Building.

De Prosse: OK, because I know that the only person who has shown up consistently besides members of the committee and consultants to the committee is a Mr. Cole Chase from the Chamber of Commerce. Other than that, I see that no member of the public has attended any of the meetings.

Carpenter: The press was there a couple times and they didn’t come back.

Hayek: Yes, they were there a few times, the press. The press knew about it.

De Prosse: Public item, talking about meeting.

Hayek: Carol, we have no control over mandatory attendance by the public.

De Prosse: I would like to speak for a while. I’m only saying, I noticed that the only person of the public that I’ve seen was Mr. Cole Chase from the Chamber of Commerce, who showed up rather consistently. I noticed that in the October 21 minutes of the Committee, which was the 2nd committee, that you were already talking about the fact that you have a jail consultant and that an architect by the name of Dobberstein was already present at that meeting. And that by the 2nd or 3rd meeting, the committee was already talking about a 244 or 256 bed facility or something in that area. The point that I would like to make, that as I read through the minutes, it seems to me that the issue is not thoroughly discussed by this committee. It was, in my opinion, set up from the beginning that there would be a large facility, it would be over 225 beds, and it would be located on the west side of town, out on Melrose Avenue. The minutes are all available on the web site for anybody who wants to go in and see them, and there may be more detailed minutes, but these are the minutes that are available to the public that I found on the web site. Yesterday, I did go into the census bureau and found many links to find out that many people have apparently studied Johnson County’s projected population growth ranging all the way from people from Iowa State University of somebody called Wooden Pool to Eastern Iowa Council of Governments to people who do marketing, study projections for real estate, projections for people who do it for advertising purposes, for mailings to people, and that nobody in the sites that I accessed came up with as high a projection figure for the population of the County in the year 2020 as did the consultant for the Jail Overcrowding Study Committee. I did find the article in today’s IC Gazette about projected population. Very interesting, because Johnson County was the 2nd county in the increase in number of people that are 65 and older, which places us 2nd in the County. When you look at every statistic available, these people are your lowest crime commiters of any group of age demographic. I did just have one question about a point being made about cost overrun, and the fact that one would have to return to the voters and ask for another vote. If the project were approved by the voters, and if you were 2/3 into it, or a fourth into it, and for whatever reason, realize that you were going to be in a cost overrun, is it that point in time that you would have to return to the voters, and if the voters said no, what would happen to the project?

Stutsman: Tony, do you want to answer that?

Roetlin: I could. The time at which you would technically (inaudible) for government, the County would need to go ask the voters, would be before spending one penny over $20.3 million. Now, likely, in my experience, local governments don’t like to go to the voters with something like that at the last minute. It kind of makes it look like they haven’t been looking forward, so it is rare that (inaudible) that happen. Usually it’s a much (inaudible).

DeProsse: I do have one other comment about the diversity of the committee, because it was my husband who wrote the letter to the paper talking about what he considered to be the lack of diversity. He was looking at the diversity of the committee, not in terms of what people did for a living and where they lived in the county, but rather whether they were more representative of what we generally mean when we talk about a diverse population. I won’t elaborate those, I think it’s stated many times in many other venues. Thank you.

Stutsman: Thank you, Carol. Any other questions?

Caroline Dieterle: I’m Caroline Dieterle, (Inaudible) Director of Iowa City. Looking at what I’ve been able to find so far, it appears to me that a large number of the people who are incarcerated here are fairly young people, people who are between maybe 18 and 24, 25 years old, which a large number of those people are obviously college students. I noted that somebody in one of the presentations was talking about that there needs to be room for football weekends, which would mean that you would be bringing in lots of people for that. As Carol just mentioned, the average age of the permanent county resident is likely to be increasing, and their crime rate falling. Here we are, basically, in a situation where we have a falling crime rate over the nation in violent crime and continuing trend of increasing incarceration rate and in 30 years or so, according to that, if the trends continue, we’d be putting virtually the entire current US population in jail. It’s got to stop somewhere, and people have to start thinking about alternatives to incarceration for non-violent crime. It bothers me very much because I do talk to people who live in the County. I know that for many people Iowa City is kind of a problem because Iowa City brings in problems that they don’t really feel that they should have to deal with. Since 65% to 70% of the bookings at the jail are the result of arrests made by the Iowa City Police Department, I fail to see why the Sheriff and the residents of Coralville, North Liberty, Tiffin, Solon, Oxford and all of the other little towns, to say nothing of farmers in the unincorporated areas have to pay for a jail that seems to be needed because of the arrest rate of the Iowa City Police Department, who is basically doing the University’s job of picking up students who drink too much. It seems to me that a much better option would be to take those kids and drop them off at the University of Public Safety and save the county residents a great deal of money. The other thing that bothers me is that it’s awfully easy because we… I think of the people in this room, very few anticipate being in this jail themselves, probably. Now, we’re also all reasonably well educated people. So that when people with expertise we can respect, such as the consultant or a financial advisor get up and have got charts and things that they put together all in good faith and all honestly, we can sit around and feel kind of self-congratulatory and virtuous about looking at these statistics and looking at these so-called facts, and we fail to ask any questions about what the reality is behind the facts, why we’re even having to look at the facts. That gets to the question of whether we are really forgetting to look at the Department of Correction’s rules about how jails have to be constructed and run, and we are interpreting them only as a prod to make more jails. We are not interpreting them as a cue that society is incarcerating too large a number of its citizens and that we need to be really looking at our policies as well as trying to build more jails. I think that’s really important here. We’re kind of looked at as an intellectual center, for what it’s worth, in the state of Iowa, and it seems to me that we should be doing that now before we take on this cost. I was interested that you were constantly talking about the Rhinelander jail. Somebody, I think, alluded to the fact that it was for multi-county constituency, and I was wondering if anybody had looked into who exactly goes into the Rhinelander jail, whether they are taking in prisoners of the same kinds that we are, where many of them are minor offences, non-violent crimes, and look and see whether really that concept is completely valid for a population in a place such as Iowa City. I would like you to think that when you look at all of these nice, modern buildings, and the screening for the design and everything, the screening for the building, our society has a way of glossing over the inevitabilities of life and death and human behavior. Essentially, I was thinking of the idea that you can buy an expensive or ornate coffin, but what’s inside is still dead. What we’re doing here is we’re building a beautiful building and hiding it very tastefully behind a screening to hide the fact that we are putting people in jail who probably don’t need to be there. I would like you to think about that before you proceed with this project.

Stutsman: Thank you. Anybody like to respond to some of Caroline’s questions about depositing at the University.

Carpenter: They have 36,000 strong as far as population. They built a 200 bed facility there and they rent out housing. It’s not a multiple county unit building that strictly for that county.

Dieterle: So they basically have got the Rhinelander version of Hotel California, where you check them in but they can’t check out.

Carpenter: Caroline, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Dieterle: Well, they’re using it as a money making function. It’s like Governor Branstad, who was talking about prisons being a growth industry in Iowa. Is that what we really want to be known for?

Carpenter: I don’t know if that has anything to do with Johnson County.

Dieterle: I do, because they were talking right here about retiring the bond issue early because we’re being able to rent out space. To whom? The Federal Government to house INS people? Who are we going to be renting it to?

Stutsman: John, did you have a comment?

Cain: Oneida County, the facility was designed and built to house Oneida County residents. The fact that it’s a facility or that the County has enough forward thinkingness to it that they don’t want to build another facility for another 20 years. They have built this 200 bed facility. They have perhaps 60 or 70 of those beds housing their own county residents. For the fact that they have made this long term investment, that that space is available, they recognize that there are counties in the surrounding northern part of the state as well as the state of Wisconsin to have entered into contracts and are making money, if you will, off of that bed rental. But that was not the principal reason for building the facility. The facility is built to meet the needs of Oneida County, not only now, but 20 years from now.

Dieterle: Yes, but the residents of Oneida County that are basically subsidizing with their tax money the money-making effort by Oneida County to house prisoners. They’re having to pay, and I’m just saying, why do the rural areas of Johnson County have to pay?

Thompson: I can speak to that. It’s a question that we asked our County Attorney about. Could we refuse to take any more people from Iowa City? We give them a quota or something like that. He says that, indeed, we can, but that housing the prisoners is our responsibility, so that even though we could require Iowa City to provide their own holding facility, in a sense to build their own jail, we would have to pay for them being there. It wouldn’t really save us any money. It would result in an additional jail facility in our county, which was something that another generation decided they wanted to get away from.

Dieterle: Excuse me, but that really isn’t the answer to the question that I asked this gentleman. He said that Oneida County is building a 200 bed facility that they did not need for the residents of the county 36,000 plus.

Cain: Not today, but in about 5 years from now.

Dieterle: But they will be in a long time.

Cain: Yes.

Dieterle: All right. But for the current person living in Oneida County, having to pay property taxes, they essentially are paying property taxes to pay for a facility that is being used basically as a space to be rented to other people.

Cain: No, it’s a building that is being built for the long-term needs of the county.

Dieterle: Yes, that’s right. They’re not calling that a vacancy rate, writing it off on taxes, surely. You’re using that space, they’re renting it somebody else, correct?

Cain: But they’re paying the debt service every month just as they would if the building was…

Dieterle: Yes, they certainly are, they are (inaudible).

Roetlin: In other counties, they’re assisting Oneida County to pay that service to pay that debt service to the system.

Cain: I think the county, if you were to talk to the elected officials in the County, I think they see it as being fiscally responsible because they and the county residents have made a long term investment for the needs of that growing county and they have an opportunity to rent that capacity, access that capacity to help pay off the debt service of that jail. The jail was not built as a money-making venture. The jail was built because the Sheriff and the county have statutory obligations and responsibilities to house those inmates that are arrested by not only Rhinelander’s Chief of Police, but the Oneida County’s Sheriff Department and all the other small cities that are in that county as well. Those are statutory responsibilities.

Dieterle: Well, I understand all of that, but it still gets it back to the fact that it’s going to be a long time before Oneida County is filling that jail with its own people. For a long time they’re going to be renting this space to other counties.

Cain: Again, I think it’s simply fiscally responsible on their part to rent that capacity out.

Dieterle: Of course it is, but (inaudible).

Cain: I don’t know how else I can answer that question.

De Prosse: It might have been a bit more fiscally responsible to have built the smaller facility to address only Oneida County’s needs rather than…

Cain: Then, instead of 20 years, 10 years from now they would have to build a facility.

De Prosse: Possibly, if we continue incarcerating huge numbers of people.

Cain: You can build jails incrementally. You can build them 20 beds at a time if you want to. Yes, you can.

Jail Site/Steering Committee Member Robert Kemp: Let me just respond for a second, Carol. On the Committee, I felt very much the same way you do. My real concern was the treatment and care of prisoners. My second concern was why are all these people coming to jail and whether it’s a growth industry or not. What I find is there is a presumption in our state and in the country. There’s a California one that may change that a little, a new initiative that may free people on drug charges.

De Prosse: I’m aware of that.

Kemp: I don’t see that happening in Iowa at this time, or anywhere in the near future. If we continue the State Legislative laws, if we continue that… This year we’ve just added the marijuana thing. If we continue that then there’s no reason to believe that politically, in the state, we’re going have a dramatic change for that. If we don’t have, then we are stuck with this kind of problem and that’s the kind of problem we’re addressing. We’re not addressing the problem of what should be. I think we have way, way, way too many people in jails and so on. But at the same time, that’s the way it is. While our aging population is increasing, that doesn’t decrease the number of people who are relatively young, who will continue to be populated in jail. Our problem is we have the laws, I don’t see any changes in the political process of changing…

De Prosse: I don’t know how we ever got laws in the laws we’ve got today if laws don’t change. But I would like to address one point, and that is that I do know that you and Norm Osland did go before a group of defense attorneys in this town, and that I have spoken to many of those defense attorneys that were there. They all felt most respectfully, I will tell you, because attorneys do speak that way, that they were very amazed at the lack of knowledge that the Committee had about alternatives that could be taken under current laws, under the codes, under the state of Iowa, that would alleviate a jail crowding in this jail today. It might not take it down to 46 beds or 92 people, but that there is a lot that could be done.

Hayek: I heard nothing, Carol, about concrete legal things that this county… They haven’t addressed any of those…

De Prosse: According to them, they were never invited to come and participate in any of your meetings.

Hayek: Everybody was invited. Whoever wanted to come, who wanted to be there, could be there.

De Prosse: You’ve had an architect, you’ve had somebody to project your jail population. You had somebody to look at the inmates that existed today, but it seems to me that you didn’t have anybody coming and talking to you about what other counties are doing. Linn County, for almost all of their small marijuana arrests, avoids the 2 day jail sentence. That’s something that’s going on. In Mason City they do the same thing.

Hayek: That’s up to the judiciary.

De Prosse: The rate of arrest in… Well, no, it’s not. No.

Hayek: I mean, I can’t force the judges to do…

De Prosse: It’s up to the County Attorney, it’s up to political people who get elected by the public to talk about these things in public. I’m not saying that as a committee member from your point of view and starting out with the kind of, what I consider, biased end, whether you had it in mind when you started or not, that you did anything wrong. I’m saying that the process was very flawed, in my opinion, and that the Committee has reached a decision with a severe lack of information that deal with alternatives. That’s only a report back that I got from a meeting that Norm Osland and Bob Kemp attended when they went and tried to talk to the defense attorneys about why they should support the proposal.

Hayek: We would certainly invite concrete suggestions about what we could do to alleviate the problem…

De Prosse: It would be nice if it had come (inaudible) spend all of this time and energy…

Hayek: …because we’re going to have this problem if the jail’s built, Carol. Just a second. If the jail’s gets built it’s not going to get done for 2 or 3 years, so we’re going to have to deal with this problem…

De Prosse: Well, if we deal with these problems and some of them get solved, we might only need 110 men in jail.

Hayek: …if we can have some concrete suggestions. Are you listening a little bit, too?

De Prosse: Well, I mean, yes, but…

Hayek: If we can have some concrete suggestions about what these things are, I want to hear them.

De Prosse: They should have come first because then we might have had about a 110 bed jail…

Hayek: Why don’t they contact me now?

De Prosse: …instead of a 255 bed jail for $20.3 million and all kinds of associate long range operating costs, and that gets back to what county residents will be paying to operate a jail facility that is primarily for the metropolitan area of the county.

Stutsman: I would like to give an opportunity for anybody else that has any questions. We’ve heard from Caroline and Carol. Is there anybody else that has any questions? In the spirit… Is there anybody?

Dieterle: Excuse me. I would just like to…

Stutsman: Caroline…

Dieterle: Hold up everybody. To whom should I just address a list questions that I would like to have answered.

Lehman: We’ll circulate them.

Stutsman: Thank you.

Dieterle: Hand that in to you?

Stutsman: If there are no other questions, Bob, you have agreed to have a tour. Also, I’d like to say, there are refreshments next door. There’s cookies and things…

Lehman: I wonder if I can just add…we asked Bob Carpenter to give us a log of, I think, a Thursday morning, it wasn’t a weekend log or anything, but just an idea. These people, I’m not going to pass judgement on them, because some of these are charges, some have been sentenced and stuff, but to give you a little bit of an idea, you can make your own judgement about the charges that people are in here for, awaiting trial or have been sentenced to. It’s public information. Bob, I’m sure, would make it available of his daily log today. Just give you a little insight of the type of people that are required to be incarcerated here.

De Prosse: It would be nice if that information could be made available to the public, but Mr. Carpenter wants to charge us here this X amount…

Carpenter: Well, Carol…

Lehman: We can stand on the street corner and give it out, force people to take it. It’s here if they want it.

Carpenter: I’m going to say one thing before this (inaudible). I have given Carol every bit of information she’s asked for. I can not continue to operate printing out day after day after day for everybody in the public without charging. That’s all I’m telling you.

De Prosse: I’m saying 50 cents a page is an outrageously high price. I’m happy to pay you something for it.

Carpenter: You may ask some of the other departments what they charge for prices for public information distributing.

De Prosse: Well, considering this is a Countywide issue we’re debating vociferously, I should think (inaudible) as much information (inaudible).

Carpenter: Carol, you haven’t been charged for nothing, so don’t tell me that.

Stutsman: Bob, are you ready to do some tours?

Carpenter: Yes. How many do we want to go with?

Stutsman: Anybody interested in going? Thank you.

Adjourned at 2:50 p.m.

Attest: Tom Slockett, Auditor

By Casie Parkins, Recording Secretary