By RYAN LANCASTER
Staff Reporter
At last Tuesday's Medical Lake City Council meeting Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich heard councilmembers air their personal and collective views on the new county jail.
Knezovich was joined by members of his staff and jail project manager, Lt. Mike Sparber, who gave the council a presentation before opening up the floor to comments.
As a whole the council said there is no doubt that replacing Geiger Corrections Center is necessary, but most had several arguments against building the new facility five miles east of town. Many raised concerns about how the facility would impact the already bottlenecked I-90 interchange, while others were frustrated that difficult to site public facilities often get pushed west.
The major criticism was the perception that the county hadn't followed its own siting process. Councilman Jeff King and others raised the land-use issues surrounding the nearly 500 acres the county wants to add to the urban growth area and rezone as light industrial, a move that has drawn threats of lawsuits that could bog down the process and add to costs.
“Rather than spend millions of dollars for a piece of property that could be tied up and increase costs every day, here's an idea, let's stick it someplace that we already own and that fits the bill and is already zoned for this,” King said.
Knezovich brought up a Central Premix gravel pit near Airway Heights that was rated second in the siting process – ahead of the Medical Lake site – saying the county has discussed the possibility of a land swap with the owners in the event that the Medical Lake interchange site falls through. “That is the number two site, so those are discussions that I think need to be brought to the table,” he said.
Regardless of where a new jail is sited, Knezovich said it must be built soon to allay rising costs and stop continued overcrowding, which could lead to more inmates being released early or not incarcerated at all.
“The community is in real peril and more importantly, each and every one of us has a certain level of liability here by running facilities that we all know are substandard,” he said. “We have to fix this issue and we have to fix it fairly rapidly.”
A quick fix isn't likely, however. Even if voters were to approve a ballot measure to pay for the new jail next year and construction started in 2013, “we're still looking at 2016 before this issue is resolved,” Knezovich said.
In other council business, City Administrator Doug Ross clarified the city's position regarding a water line issue at Hallett Elementary School, where the Medical Lake School District is planning to build classroom additions. At the February school board meeting the district's project manager, Rusty Pritchard, said the city had asked the district to maintain water lines on the Hallett property following construction.
Ross explained that the Hallett design calls for a structural retaining wall to be built four feet from where the water line now sits, making repairs difficult.
“We could not get in there and repair that without damaging that wall,” Ross told the council. “We basically said you can either relocate that farther away from the wall or you can take over the lines on school grounds. That got interpreted in the paper as we just said they had to take over the water lines and that's not what we said…It continues to be a bit of a sticking point.”
Council approved a consultant agreement with E&H Engineering for design and inspections work on a project to construct a new sidewalk on the north side of SR 902 between Stanley Street and Graham Lane. The city will fund the bulk of the project through a $137,430 grant from the state Transportation Improvement Board.
Councilman Art Kulibert said a vote is no longer necessary regarding use of a software program that enables remote scheduling and viewing of on duty fire department crews. The item was tabled at the last council meeting when there was concern over how open records law might apply to the system. Ross said he bypassed the question by setting up a spreadsheet through Google Docs, which allows scheduling data to be stored online and not on city servers.
Ross also told the council that City Hall has completed a rebate program through Avista, spending $20,000 to replace all lights with low energy bulbs and ballasts. The city will get $10,000 back as a rebate and Ross said the rest of the investment is expected to be recouped within three years. City Hall was also recently fitted with electronic keypads due to a set of lost keys, Ross said.
Ryan Lancaster can be reached at [email protected].
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