County project team shifts jail site to Hanigan Road; STV outlines programming, schedule and capacity work

Adam Johnson, project director for STV, told the Justice Project Oversight and Planning Committee on April 16 that the county's jail and Behavioral Care Center project has been moved "no longer building in Ferndale. We are now building on Hanigan Road," a change he said will reduce environmental permitting and ground-improvement costs and speed the schedule.

Johnson said STV has completed scenario development and is in a concentrated programming phase. He described a five-week programming exercise that will produce a draft jail program at the end of April for the design-build team to translate into a basis-of-design document. That basis of design will include blocking and stacking diagrams, operational cost and staffing estimates and preliminary site placement of housing units and support spaces.

The programming work included three intensive in-person days with frontline staff and courts representatives, Johnson said, allowing the team to size administrative, kitchen, laundry and medical support spaces and identify court-space needs that have created a bottleneck at the current downtown facility. "We spent three full days talking to all those folks," he said, describing interviews with booking and classification officers and health partners to determine what the facility must accommodate.

Johnson also explained why population forecasts must be translated into built-environment requirements. The county's recent jail population analysis identified types of beds required by 2030 (detox, subacute mental-health beds, special-needs housing, minimum/maximum-security beds), but those figures must be converted into usable housing units, circulation and supervision geometries. "All of these numbers are really a bed need for special housing units and the types of housing units, but it still needs to get translated for a programmer to look at and say, 'what does that translate into a built environment space?'" he said.

Johnson outlined the near-term timeline: a draft jail program by the end of April, a final report in early August and entry into detailed design in late August or September. He cautioned that programming will produce a range of bed counts rather than locking a final capacity: "We're likely going to have a sort of a range of beds. Nothing locks us into. we're absolutely going to have 490 beds or 412 beds," he said, stressing that many elements remain subject to change during design.

The project team listed the stakeholders and inputs guiding design: the implementation plan and needs assessment, interviews with the sheriff's office and health partners, the behavioral-health analysis, and community engagement. Johnson said the programming will also produce operational staffing estimates to ensure the county does not design a facility it cannot staff.

Next steps include circulating the draft jail program for stakeholder input and then having the design-build team develop schematics and cost estimates for the $225 million scenario requested by the Financial and Facilities Advisory Board.