Cabarrus Commissioner meeting highlights: Coy lives! - no decision on jail yet.

I just got back from tonights' County Commissioner meeting.
Commissioner Coy Privette crawled out of the cave he's been hiding in since his "aiding and abetting prostitution" charges, just to come vote on the main issue on the agenda: "the Jail compromise".
Mr. Privette didn't look too good physically. He looked tired, worn down and seemed to have aged a few years in the past weeks.

I had expected there to be a big turnout of jail opponents at the meeting (like we had at last month's meeting), but instead the room was only 2/3 full and only 2 people spoke during the public comments moment at the beginning of the meeting, one for the compromise and one against.

The actual item on the agenda that dealt with the whole jail issue was to approve an amendment to the contract of the Ware Bonsall architectural bureau, which would pay them to come up with schematic drawings and models of the kind of jail housing unit that the compromise talked about. You can read more about the outlines of that compromise in yesterdays' post on this blog.

As you could read yesterday, the order for the schematic drawings would cost the county $375,000. I was surprised to hear that this is the price for just some schematics and models that will give you an impression of how the redesigned jail housing unit would look. These are definitely not "ready to build" plans.
It would take 3 months to come up with these models. If the county would then decide to go ahead with a redesign, it would take another 6 to 8 months before definitive plans would be ready and the bidding process could start. The bidding process would end another 3 months after that.
Conclusion: if the County wants to redesign the building, it would take at least another year before they could start the actual construction.

There was some confusion about how many beds the redesigned building could hold. Apparently Commissioner Mynatt and White had used some wrong numbers when debating a compromise with the jail opponents. Mynatt said she wanted to meet with the architects again and this time use the correct numbers, so they could conclusively say how many jail beds a redesigned housing unit could hold.
After this the commissioners decided to table the issue and vote on it next time. Kind of an anti-climactic end to the evening if you ask me: they decided not to decide yet.

Tomorrow I'll talk more about some of the issues (and there were a lot) that were raised in the whole debate tonight. See you then!