Prison money not enough to open on schedule

PALMER — When the dust had cleared on the state’s operating budget Friday, the Goose Creek Correctional Center was left without enough money to open on time.

The Department of Corrections had sought $3.6 million to begin the process of opening up the prison now under construction at Point MacKenzie. But then the state Senate Finance Committee stepped in, successfully recommending that the money be cut from the Senate’s budget.

Senators were mostly concerned with how much more the prison would cost to operate than the state pays currently to house prisoners in Colorado. Goose Creek was, among other things, DOC’s attempt to bring those prisoners home. In the Senate, the word “mothballing” was tossed around, with the idea being to let the prison remain unoccupied while the prisoners remained out of state.

The House of Representatives retained the money in its budget. When the House and Senate met to reconcile the two operating budgets, Sen. Lyman Hoffman (D-Bethel) moved without opposition to include a compromise figure of $2.4 million. The reconciled budget passed Friday and is awaiting the governor’s signature.

Valley legislators have opposed cutting the funding at every turn, but have not been successful in persuading their colleagues. Wasilla Republican Wes Keller even threw out the idea of bringing in a private contractor to operate the facility.

Shalon Harrington, DOC’s legislative liaison, said the department is currently looking at what it will be able to do with that money.

“The department has sat down and had the preliminary discussion,” she said. “We are going to do the best we can with what we have.”

The $3.6 million figure was enough to move 30 prisoners into the facility for the last three months of fiscal year 2012 and rotate them throughout the facility to make sure everything worked. The process is often referred to as validating the warranty and is DOC’s way to make sure electronics, boilers and other pieces of the prison are working properly and don’t need to be replaced.

But the $2.4 million, Harrington said, is probably only enough to make payments on the debt, pay the company that will provide sewer and water services there — Valley Utilities — and hire a private company to guard the building from squatters and vandals.

Those debt payments will go to the Mat-Su Borough, which constructed the $216 million prison with the understanding that DOC would pay for it with lease payments. Valley Utilities was formed in order to go after the contract and has a similar arrangement in that its facilities at the prison will be handed over to the borough or the state once the debt is paid off through fees for the services provided.

Harrington said that although it doesn’t look like the prison will open on schedule, the best-case scenario, in which funding is obtained in the fiscal year 2013 budget, would only entail a three-month delay in the process, since those 30 prisoners were only going to show up in the last three months of FY 2012.

And whether DOC can come up with some other plan besides paying debt and putting guards at the facility after it’s built is yet to be seen. Again, officials there are only starting the discussion.

“As soon as (legislators) finish and gavel out from the session we’re just going to have to come up with a Plan B,” Harrington said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.