This action alert is the joint effort of several people who care about the cost the proposed jail expansion would bring to Tompkins County.
Did you oppose the proposed jail expansion? If so, you need to step up to the plate now and stand behind our county legislature as it is being attacked for representing our wishes with their vote to oppose the expansion. We can not ask our local legislators to take tough stands, and then leave them hanging in the breeze while the right wing media smears them as Bad for Ithaca. This smear is Step One in a larger campaign to weaken our progressive county legislature before the fall elections.
Here is your action alert. Please read the details before taking action. We are counting on you.
Every morning for the past few weeks, Casey Stevens has been using his morning program, "The Morning Report" (870 AM on WHCU) to rail about how much money the county legislature is wasting by "shipping people out" to other counties' jails, where they will "languish" without the benefit of ATI programs. Their families and friends can't visit them, and the Tompkins County "so-called Public Safety Building" is "inadequate and unsafe." He chastises this legislature for having opposed the jail expansion. He repeats his little rant several times a day, meaning that people who are tuning in at different times are getting it at least once a day. It is orchestrated, it is part of a bigger plan, but it is not factual.
Your action alert is to 1) call and correct him and the owner of Eagle Broadcasting on the facts and 2) write the station, the local paper and any other sources of communication you have and help set the record straight. Let's let Casey Stevens know that our legislature voted for what is in Ithaca's best interests.
Briefly here are the facts, which Casey has been told over and over but he conveniently ignores:
Money: It's far more expensive to build a new jail than to board people out.
The new jail would cost county taxpayers at least $2 million
every year for 20 years, by itself adding about 6% to our property tax
rate every year.
These costs are mostly for added staffing (about $400,000), plus a new debt service payment of about $1.6 million per year for twenty years. Additional costs to heat, clean and insure the building are not included.
This annual increase will be almost entirely composed of fixed costs - expenses that must be paid whether the jail is full or half-empty.
We SAVE money every day that we board out fewer than 52 inmates!
ATI programs: The people being boarded out would not be in ATI even if we had tons of extra cells in our jail and never boarded anyone out. Everyone who enters our jail is screened to see whether they're appropriate for our ATI programs, and if they are, they're given the option to participate.
There are many complicated reasons why someone would choose ATI or not. But basically, if they're IN the jail, they're either not appropriate for ATI or they've chosen not to participate! And since we only board out people who are in the jail (duh!), the people boarded out are ALSO not appropriate for ATI or they've chosen not to participate! There may be occasional exceptions to this, but in general the people being boarded out would not be in our ATI programs even if we had 136 cells like the Commission wanted us to build.
Visitation: This is the biggest downside of boarding out. While it's NOT true that family and friends CANNOT visit, as Casey likes to say, it is true that they have to travel farther to visit. Our legislators who voted against the jail expansion acknowledge this problem, but they believe, and we concur, that it isn't sufficient reason to build 136 cells, when our average daily population is in the 60's (and is as low as it was in 1995!).
Inadequate Public Safety Building: We acknowledge that the PSB is crowded, especially on the Civil side (Sheriff's Road Patrol), and we'd like to make renovations and improvements. We'd especially like to add program space for the inmates. But the way the State Commission on Corrections operates, if we do anything we have to do it all. They get to approve any renovations we would do, and they have said that if we undertake any renovation for any reason, we must also include expansion to 136 cells. So we are trapped. State law is murky on whether they're overstepping their legal authority, but most of our legislators aren't interested in the expense and risk of challenging them in court, at least not at this point.
Unsafe Public Safety Building: Casey is just plain wrong about this, and is irresponsible in continuing to make this charge. As said above, the Commission on Corrections watches everything we do, especially including operations from the point of view of safety for inmates and corrections officials. If anything we were doing were unsafe they would be on us immediately.
If money were the only issue in this campaign, then the logic would be simple and Casey would have nothing to say. There is no way around that fact that our decision not to expand the jail has saved taxpayers buckets of money.
But clearly this is part of a larger ideological battle about the nature of law enforcement, punishment and rehabilitation. It's also a thinly-veiled attempt to weaken Tim Joseph, who's seen as the point person in all this. (Never mind that he's only one vote out of 8!) In addition, this is the year that the District Attorney has to run for reelection, and politics is personal to the extent that George Dentes is unsupportive of the ATI programs, and would love to see Tim defeated in his reelection.
What to do:
http://www.whcu870.com/ is a web-based form to contact Casey, whose email is cqs@radioeagle.com. Ken Cowan owns the company (Eagle Broadcasting, which is a group of 4 stations) and his email is kac@radioeagle.com (phone 257-6400). My suggestion would be to go around Casey directly to the newspapers (including the Cortland Standard, which people in Groton and Dryden read -- cortstan@twcny.rr.com) and to Ken Cowan.
