Jordahl: Sally?

Stutsman: Let’s see. Yesterday I was in Des Moines all day for a meeting of the Medicaid Option Task Force. To refresh people’s memories, the legislature is mandating that the State look into additional funding for the chronically mentally ill. One of those options is to get more federal Medicaid funding. In order to access federal Medicaid funding there has to be an amendment to the Iowa State Plan. We’re in the process of putting together that amendment to access additional federal dollars for the chronically mentally ill. What we worked on yesterday was defining the services that would be included in this, and then we’ll work on talking about provider qualifications and accreditation and how reimbursement will be done. Hopefully all of the work of this task force will be done in December and then we will be presenting it to the Legislature and submitting the plan to the HIFCA, or the federal planning agency for approval. Hopefully that all will be put into place. The idea of getting more additional federal dollars is very good for Johnson County because we already fund a lot of these services for the chronically mentally ill and they are all funded, totally, from County tax dollars. This would allow us to continue to provide these services but we would be using federal dollars to pay for 75% of the services and 25% would come from County tax dollars. For Johnson County it would be very good. For some small rural counties that don’t fund these services, it would be asking them to put forth that match with County tax dollars which they aren’t currently doing. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. We will be talking about this at the ISAC, Iowa State Association of Counties, with a supervisor’s affiliate and presenting what’s being considered, to get feedback and let them know what’s happening.

Jordahl: Sounds like that could make some room in our mental health budget.

Stutsman: Right.

Jordahl: Hurray for us.

Stutsman: Right. Hurray for us, but ultimately it’s hurray for the consumer. Because what this is trying to do is make sure that all consumers in the state have equal access and equal services. I was telling Mike earlier it really is not fair to consumers when you think if you have a chronic mental illness in Johnson County you get services, but you have that same disability in another county in Iowa and you don’t get those services funded. That’s part of the real advantage to this is making sure that all people in the state get the same level of services no matter where they live.

Jordahl: One reason, well I guess I can’t discuss this can I. We’re in a non-discussion. We’re in reports.

White: You can report.

Lehman: You could ask it in the form of a question.

White: Can’t deliberate.

Jordahl: Let’s see here. Deliberating would be choosing action, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t be choosing action.

White: No, it wouldn’t be choosing.

Jordahl: Discussing whether to choose action?

White: It would be discussing the merits of some issue.

Jordahl: Well, I was going to discuss merits, so I guess I better be quiet.

White: Don’t do it.

Jordahl: Is that all Sally?

White: Can I put a footnote with that report? Because I went through a case recently. The charge was arson. We had a young man who set fire to a house on Church Street and he’s now serving a 10 year prison sentence for that, but he has a history of some psychiatric diagnosis and is retarded probably at what would be described as a mild level. Underscoring the fact that we don’t get equal treatment, the Woodbury County Judicial Hospitalization Referee placed this young man in Johnson County. Ordered him committed to the Community Mental Health Center and Hillcrest Family Services. He had no connection to Johnson County whatsoever, but found our services to be something that was applicable and not available elsewhere. Sent him here inappropriately, he needed much more structure than the environment he went into, within a very short time set fire to his room, endangered the lives of all the people in the house, and now he’s in prison. Part of the reason is the mental health system saw us as a place they could pack this young man off to. It’s just sad.

Stutsman: It is.

White: He was not well served in our mental health system.

Stutsman: It’s interesting. I remember you talking about that particular situation , and yesterday Woodbury County was one of those counties that was mentioned that does not provide funding for these kinds of services, and I thought, hmm, interesting. Ultimately where the tragedy is is the client.

White: Absolutely.

Stutsman: They do not get the services that they need. I see Bill Garnos is here, but this is one of the issues that was talked about yesterday too, is the increase we’re seeing in the jails from people who do not belong in jails necessarily. They are people with mental health issues, and how we deal with that, and that’s going to be a real issue too. There’s no place else for these people to go. It’s not to say they don’t belong in jail. They have committed a crime and that’s where they should be, but they need treatment. They just don’t need incarceration.

Jordahl: I wanted to see if I could phrase this as (inaudible) thing. I just think that the reason the Johnson County is able to have these services available is that we serve as a reservoir for a lot of state money that comes into the hospital and the university in addition to whatever economic vitality kind of piggy-backs upon the existence of those things, but the inequity of services is in part due to the inequitable distribution of state resources. A lot of them get dumped in here and that’s why we have to standard of living we do. It’s good to see a motion in the direction of spreading that back around and saying this needs to be available everywhere. Somehow.

Stutsman: I agree.

Jordahl: So, good work. I don’t have a great deal to report. We had an uneven, wait a minute. Charlie, pardon me, your turn.

Duffy: I prefer to make a report on trails in Johnson County.

Jordahl: Yes, what about them?

Duffy: I can talk for a half hour. You really can’t win them all, but I am Chair of ECICOG, and a lot of those dollars are going to go for trails through ECICOG. I didn’t want to vote no on the road portion of it, but I still think I was right. I guess next Tuesday is going to be busy day here, and that’s when I have my Rural Economic Development Council Meeting. There are some things like Iowa technology getting showcased. One of their main things on there, Lieutenant Governor Sally Peterson was going to talk about the work force in Iowa, and then the Governor’s strategic planning. It’s just a real good agenda here, but under the circumstances I think I better stay home and count votes. It’s going to be what, 2 hours? Is that what you said Pat?

White: It’s going to take a while. I’ll let the Auditor do the estimating of time, but it will take a while. I think the plan, Charlie, is not that Board members have to handle all of those ballots, but the Auditor will bring its staff and you’ll supervise it. But that’s a decision that the Board makes. Whatever the process that occurs is under the authority of your canvas, and the Auditor will make a recommendation to you but you’ll certainly decide how you want to do it.

Duffy: I think I’m the only Supervisor on this committee, been on it for about 10 years, and there are about 50 or more people show up, state and federal employees and everything. Almost everything that we talk about here goes through the Department of Economic Development. A lot of people think that economic development is industrial and commercial property and that’s all, but no, it’s different. I think I’ll probably have to call them tomorrow and cancel it.

Jordahl: I think it is an important thing that you’re part of that group, Charlie, and as long as we have 3 of us here for a quorum. I understood from talking with Tom Slockett yesterday about this that, that’s what I was going to report on, is that because of the close elections we have that we’re going to need this recount thing to be done in a very different, I don’t know exactly the, we need to count, or canvass the vote in a very different way than we normally do. It was suggested that we could maybe have the Auditor be doing that while we were conducting our meeting. We could do a certain amount of reviewing the ballots and delegate and watch them operate and have this all going on at once, but that’s again a decision we can make. That was, I think, the suggestion Tom was making, is that it was going to take a while to do. Let’s see here. We have, back to Item B here, work session available to us, and maybe we should just go to that. How do we declare something a work session? Do I hit the hammer again here? We’re going to just tell Casie this is a work session here. This item on the agenda.

Stutsman: Could we take a short break?

Jordahl: We could take a short break. We could even take a long break. Let’s make it at least 5 minutes.

Stutsman: OK.

Recessed at 7:30 p.m.; reconvened at 7:43 p.m.

Neumann Monson AIA Project Architect Dwight Dobberstein introduced Criminal Justice Consultant Bill Garnos and said he was here to present his final report on the Johnson County Jail. Criminal Justice Consultant Bill Garnos said they have been doing a number of different things and the report he submitted is a culmination of all of those things. He said they have taken the Sheriff’s Department on tours of other facilities to see what a properly designed jail should look like. Garnos said they had a very good meeting with the State Jail Inspector, in that it possibly has bought the County time for dealing with their jail problems. Garnos said they are fortunate they have a state jail inspector who is not a bureaucrat and is willing to be realistic and work with people. Jordahl asked if they talked about money and Garnos said no.

Garnos said when he first started working for the County the goal was to figure out how to make the current jail last longer. Garnos said the jail is a nice looking building and they don’t want to walk away from this County resource. He said in his talk with the State Jail Inspector they talked about the problems of the building and the possibility of expansion of the facility. Garnos said the State Jail Inspector liked the direction they were going in. Garnos said since that time they have moved further and further away from trying to salvage the current jail. He said their ultimate recommendation is to recommend a new facility. Garnos said they were able to come up with schemes that would make the current building work, but there are many drawbacks. He said it would be expensive, the expansion would be very large, there are site issues, the expansion of the building would be awkward and the facility would eventually be dwarfed by its own expansion.

Garnos said a lot of the problems the County faces are due to its rapidly growing population. He stated the County population has increased by almost a third since 1980 when the current Jail was planned and designed. Garnos said with a growing population there is an increased jail population. He said in the next 20 years Johnson County will probably have a 26% increase in population. Garnos said the criminal caseload in Johnson County has quadrupled since the opening of the Jail. He said OWI cases take up about 1/3 of the caseload although recently it has dropped to a 1/4. Stutsman asked why the data was divided into OWI and non-OWI. Garnos responded that was the way the data came from the County Attorney’s Office. Jordahl asked about the definition of criminal caseload. White said this is the same data the Board receives at budget time and it represents the number of charges filed. Jordahl asked what the relationship was between this data and the number of people in the jail. White said many of the charges result in jail time. Garnos pointed out that even if those charged do not stay in the facility they are processed through the facility.

Garnos said Jail bookings have more than quadrupled since the opening of the Jail. He said one of the reasons he looks at bookings is because a jail has 2 functions, the processing and releasing of people, which are the bookings, and confinement of people. Garnos said when people look at jail problems they tend to look at the number of beds, but they forget a jail has a large volume of people who are in and out of the facility every day. He said a good facility needs to do both well. He said the current facility doesn’t do either aspect well. Garnos said the intake and release area is a critical part of a good functioning jail. He said our intake and release capabilities are not good and that this is a separate function and has nothing to do with capacity and beds.

Garnos said the average daily population of the Jail has more than tripled and almost quadrupled since 1981. Garnos explained in 1999 from January to October the average daily population was 94.1. He said there is a maximum of 92 beds at the jail. Garnos said from 1993 to present the rate of increase at the jail has been much steeper than it was over the life of the Jail. Garnos said they are in a serious situation as far as capacity as every cell has already been given 2 bunks. Garnos said they have to remember that the Jail has a population above the average daily population about half of the time. Garnos said they studied how much the peak was over the average. He said in the period from 1993 to present the peak population each month is 25% over the average daily population. This shows that the Jail has frequently been operating over capacity not only with average daily populations but also with peak populations. He said the highest population of the Jail was 127 people on one day.

Garnos said they ran projections with the data they have, realizing changes in laws and law enforcement practices or policies could change their projections. He said one projection they ran was just to extend the current rate of growth for the next 20 years. A second projection was to use the steeper rate of growth that has occurred since 1993. He said for planning purposes they used the midpoint between these 2 projections. He said it’s not as conservative, but it’s not worse case scenario either. Garnos said that the Sheriff has been working on using other programs, such as electronic monitoring, for people that do not need to be in the Jail. Garnos stated that the midpoint they chose was conservative, assuming a lower rate of growth than the rate of growth from 1993 to 1999. Garnos said he didn’t want to come to the Board of Supervisors with worst case scenario projections, so they tried to have reasonable projections of where the inmate population is going. Jordahl asked if the trendline for the last 4 years would be more correct. Garnos replied he was concerned with making adjustments to the baseline forecasts to try to accommodate a number of factors. Garnos said when they are short on jail beds a number of things happen. He said you run into the situation that if you build it they will come. He said there may be people out there now who need jail time but don’t get it because it is known that beds are a scarce expensive resource. He said there maybe be changes in sentencing and enforcement practices when jail beds are available. He said these types of factors tend to drive the number of beds and inmates up. He said having a limited capacity tends to suppress the historical inmate population trends. Garnos said anyway they look at it their projections are going to be conservative. Garnos said because their projections are conservative they need to continue to support and expand alternatives, diversion plans, and the use of monitors.

Jordahl said they’ve had a history as a government of wanting to build something for the future but not wanting to spend the money. Jordahl asked if using the conservative estimate would result in the same problem of over crowding 20 years down the road. Garnos said that this is possible. He said there are things they do to accommodate this in jail planning today. Garnos said it was his understanding that the Johnson County Jail was downsized several times, and if anything the Johnson County jail was under built. He said they didn’t build expansion capability into the facility and there was little they could do besides adding a second bunk into the cells. He said today when they build jails they oversize the kitchen and intake/release areas so that when they need to add on additional inmate housing they can do this with the support services there to accommodate it. Garnos said other things they can do are to add 2 bunks to each cell. Garnos said Sioux Falls, South Dakota is similar to Iowa City. He said they are building a 390 bed jail and a 150 bed work release facility. He said that they are building this based on their 10 year projection. He said until they reach capacity they are renting their facility out to other counties and the Federal Government. Garnos said the inmate population in Johnson County is relatively small for a community of this size. He said that most communities have to deal with many more inmates per general population.

Jordahl asked if there is an effect on the standards for arrests based on whether or not there is a place to put the people. Garnos said having a limited capacity effects arrest practices, prosecution policies, and sentencing practices, to an extent. Garnos said that his project was an inmate population projection, not bed needs. Garnos said they ran 2 other projections where they attempted to correlate the growth of the jail population with the growth of the County population. He said one model included the whole population and the other only included the population aged 18 to 64. He said both of these projections tracked with the lower 1981 to 1999 trend line. He said this gave him more confidence in using the midpoint as the baseline and not using the 1993 to 1999 trend line. Jordahl asked if there was a general trend of increased rate of crime with the increased density of population. Garnos said that this was true in a jurisdiction where there is growth. Garnos said that people have a hard time understanding this because of the decreasing national crime rate. He said local cases do not apply to the national standard.

Garnos said to try to predict bed needs they used the baseline forecast of inmate population and added the 25% peak factor to accommodate routine fluctuation in jail population and a 10% classification factor. He said this classification factor is wiggle room because you can’t get 100 inmates to fit in 100 beds perfectly, extra beds are needed to separate males from females, different level of security needs, and extra beds to separate inmates that need to be separated. He said in the existing facility this is impossible because there are no extra beds. He said using this projection the County would need a 187 jail beds in 10 years. Garnos said the next step to take using the existing facility would be to subtract that resource off the bed needs. He said in the existing facility the State Jail Inspector said some of the cells could continue to have 2 beds if all of the other issues were addressed. He said the problem with the existing facility is that the cells are built to accommodate 2 beds yet the day room area is undersized even for one person. He said by today’s standards you couldn’t put 2 inmates in each cell because the day rooms aren’t big enough to accommodate them.

Garnos said they identified 4 problems with the existing Jail. He said the first is insufficient inmate housing. Garnos said the second is inadequate space for intake and release, including a small booking room and a small property storage room. He said the third problem is all the cells are on the exterior walls with everything else in the center resulting in strain on program space, visitation space, kitchen space, and laundry space. He said they did a ball park program for a new facility and used it to try to size the expansion of the existing facility. Garnos discussed some of the construction and expansion options. He said one option is to expand the existing facility, he said this can be done in different ways. Garnos said a second option is constructing a new facility on a new site. He said this is advantageous because it can be done without interrupting the operations of the existing facility. He said the third option is to establish a separate minimum security work release facility. He said this would be cheaper to construct and operate. Garnos said options 3 and 4, which is just constructing another facility to handle the overflow, involve running 2 facilities which is inefficient for staffing. He said they are not sure that there are enough minimum security and work release inmates in there to justify a separate facility for them. He said most of the inmates on work release are currently on electronic monitors and there are not a large number of these inmates. He said building a facility for these inmates would not solve the problem.

Jordahl asked if there is a lot of seasonal or occasional arrests for drunkenness, for example on football weekends, and if these things account for the major fluctuations. Garnos said that there are a large number of bookings that are alcohol and drug related. He said he was not sure that he could say that the jail population is seasonal, that there is a steady growth, and the people with the low level drug and alcohol offenses are not the ones that are filling up the beds. He said this puts the strain on intake and release. Garnos said one of the other problems is to not generalize about the types of offenses because the most dangerous inmate Garnos encountered was brought in on drunk driving. Garnos said to truly assess risk with an individual there is an objective jail classification system based on several factors and then you can place the individual in the proper security level. He said this can’t be done in the Johnson County Jail because there are not enough beds available. He said they need to be able to assess risk and be able to use this information. Jordahl asked if risk assessment can be done on an objective basis by going through their criminal records. Garnos said it is objective based on criminal records and other characteristics. He said it isn’t fool proof but it is objective.

Garnos said that after looking at the different options their conclusion is that there is little they can do with the existing facility. Garnos said the fourth problem area is the lack of visibility into the inmate housing areas. He said he has never seen a facility that so precludes the ability to see inmates and this is a big concern in jail design. He said this requires that they peak in on inmates periodically rather than continuously observing them. He said if they continued to use this facility he would suggest increasing visibility. He said this isn’t the most critical issue but it is a major drawback to using the existing facility. He said because of how the inmate area is designed, he is not sure how much money should be spent to save it. Garnos said their conclusion was that the best solution is build a new facility. He pointed out that 10% of the costs are building the building and 90% of the costs are operations, 3/4 of this is staffing. He said staffing is the most critical design aspect of the facility. He suggested looking at the staffing implications when considering the different options because they are the costs that will be faced year after year. He said there will be a huge staffing impact no matter what option is chosen, due to the difference from peaking in periodically at the inmates from continuous observation.

Lehman asked what the square footage of the current building is in order to know how much larger a new facility would be. Jordahl said it was 2,600. Lehman asked if it would be a building 3 times the size. Garnos said the jail and the Sheriff’s Offices have space needs. He said every inch of space is being used. Lehman said that Garnos was pointing out the efficiency of the whole facility, which most people don’t think of. Garnos agreed and said that a lot of it doesn’t have to do with the number of beds.

Stutsman asked about the needs of the inmates who are mentally ill and need treatment rather than incarceration. Garnos said there is a problem dealing with the mentally ill. He said that jail is not a good place for these people. He said the other problem is that they don’t have a good space for doing programs in the current facility because there is no room and there is no staff. Jordahl asked if it can be a part of the sentencing to order that they spend time in treatment. White said that treatment programs also have a shortage of space and staff. White said that he has urged the legislature that people arrested be required to undergo substance abuse evaluation and treatment. Jordahl said we make distinctions about crimes and we currently perform assessments. White said yes, but it requires staff and the people in the jail are there for a short time period. Jordahl said he wasn’t talking about starting a treatment program. He said he was talking about the level of securities responding to the needs of the individuals in the system. Garnos said in a new facility different types of criminals would be taken into account from design of intake and release to inmate housing. Jordahl said he was talking about 2 different facilities, one for the dangerous criminals and a facility for people who are drunk for the weekend. Garnos said a properly designed intake and release is designed for processing people in and out. He said in the current facility the intake and release area does not provide choices because there are only 3 holding areas. Garnos said there are few inmates that do not have some substance abuse problem tied into what has gotten them into trouble either directly or indirectly. Stutsman said the Iowa Department of Corrections is seeing the connection between inmates who are mentally ill and they are developing projects for dealing with them. Garnos said the Johnson County Jail is not a sensitive environment for people with mental health problems.

Jordahl said that there are different classes of prisoners and asked if there is some way to redeem the existing facility to find a class of prisoner that it could be used for and then build another facility to address the needs of another class of prisoners more inexpensively. Jordahl asked if the problem with that is staffing. Garnos responded that they always try to look for an alternative use for an existing facility. Garnos said the existing facility is 20 years old and undersized. He said yes they can try something different like getting the minimum or maximum security needs out. He said both of these require using 2 facilities. Garnos said that the staff for the current facility is shared with the staff for the Sheriff’s Office. He said different facilities lose the immediate emergency backup. He said most serious disrupts take seconds to occur and having immediate backup on site can make a significant difference. He said a new facility would double up beds in every condition possible. He said they worked out a way to save the existing building. Garnos said there are some options for selling the existing facility, which would offset the money for building a new facility.

Duffy asked about regional jails. Garnos said he is a regional jail expert. He said that many little communities are looking at regional jails. Garnos said regional jails work well in rural areas where it is easier to go together on a 200 bed facility than to have a bunch of 30 bed facilities. He said a second area where regional jails work well is where the state provides a large financial incentive. Garnos said the state does this because they realize the benefits of running economies of scale.

White said that in light of the problems of the current facility the Sheriff Bob Carpenter, and County employees have served the County extraordinarily well. White said they have experienced hardly any jail problems that have resulted in litigation or costs. He said the jail staff is performing outstanding services, especially when you consider the increasingly problematic circumstances. Garnos said he couldn’t agree more. He said it’s difficult to recruit and retain jail staff. He said when they look at the salaries of jail staff and what they have to put up with every day, it is a very difficult job. He said a high degree of professionalism is expected out of them. Garnos said they have to be careful of how they document problems of the jail because it can come back to haunt them in an inmate lawsuit. He said the more the problems of the jail are documented the more it could potentially harm the County.

Stutsman said that this was an excellent report and it was needed to help continue the process of addressing the problem with space at the Jail. Garnos said there are alternatives and that the County needs to continue to push them and support them. He said there are not solutions that can make the jail problem go away. He said anything they can do to help should be done, but it isn’t going to make the facility any better. Garnos said the hard problem is making the decision and educating the public. Lehman noted that the good quality of the staff makes it hard to convince the public that there is a problem. Garnos said tax payers don’t want to spend money on this.

Jordahl asked about the relationship between the jail and juvenile detention. He asked how big the line between detaining juveniles and adults in the same facility has to be. Garnos said it varies state by state, with different regulations on location and staff. He said in a new facility options could be explored. Stutsman said the juvenile detention problem in Johnson County had been addressed with the Linn County contract. Duffy noted the juvenile facility has a different kind of atmosphere and that is what juveniles need. Garnos said juveniles in detention are a tough group to deal with.

Garnos thanked the Board. He said their work was of a limited scope in Johnson County. White said they have some room for a follow up so at the point they decide to move on a project, they will need some consultation. Dobberstein said they are waiting to see what direction the Jail Committee wants to proceed. White said the Jail Committee is on the first month of their 4 month time frame.

Adjourned at 9:17 p.m.

Attest: Tom Slockett, Auditor

By Casie Parkins, Recording Secretary