The Register-Herald
Charleston, W.Va. (AP) -- Corrections officers at regional jails should become civil service employees when the last jail is built in about a year, the director of the jail system says.
Once the Tygart Valley Regional Jail is completed, the Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority will have about 1,200 employees, making it one of state government’s bigger agencies, Executive Director Steve Canterbury told a legislative interim committee on Monday.
The Legislature exempted regional jail officers from the civil service system because regional jails replace county jails, and state law guarantees county jailers jobs at a regional jail. If someone who had taken the civil service test got a higher score than a county jail officer but the county officer got an open job, it could have led to lawsuits, Canterbury said.
The Tygart jail, which will replace county jails in Pocahontas, Randolph, Barbour, Taylor and Preston counties, will be the last regional jail, completing the 10-jail system. No more county officers will be hired, so there will no longer be a problem with transferring all officers to the civil service system, Canterbury said.
Although all officers technically now work at his will and pleasure, Canterbury said his agency’s hiring and firing practices have always followed a prescribed process.
Also Monday, Canterbury told legislators that plans to build a 144-cell addition at the Mount Olive Correctional Complex are being put on hold because a complex bond financing plan apparently will not work.
The maximum-security prison in Fayette County was built with regional jail authority bond money and so is technically owned by those bondholders.
Canterbury had wanted to use money from Economic Development Authority bonds to build the addition. Those bondholders would then own that addition.
Insurance companies that protect bondholders, however, decided that in a worst-case scenario if the state was not able to repay the bonds, it would not be clear which bondholders would own the prison, Canterbury said.
“From our point of view that is not going to happen,” Canterbury said. The state has a good bond rating and will repay all the bonds. But the insurance companies won’t allow the arrangement.
Canterbury now is trying to come up with an alternative funding source for the addition, which was originally slated to cost about $12 million. He said he may ask the Legislature next year for general revenue money. The cost by then is likely to be $18 million because of increased steel and gas prices, he said.
In the meantime, that $12 million EDA bond money can be used for other jail and prison construction projects. Because of the prices, those projects also need more money, Canterbury said.
Plans to add 200 cells and upgrade the fire alarm and suppression system at the Huttonsville Correctional Complex originally had been projected to cost about $12 million and now will get an additional $6 million.
Canterbury said he did not know how the rest of the Mount Olive money will be distributed but it will go to the following projects:
- Replacing the Davis Center in Tucker County with a new facility that originally was to cost $10 million.
- Remodeling the Eastern Panhandle juvenile detention center at an original cost of $5 million.
- Building a 120-inmate minimum-security dorm at the Lakin Correctional Facility for Women. The original cost was just under $6 million.
- Reimbursing the State Police for its purchase of property next to the academy in Dunbar.
In all, about $45 million will be available from the Economic Development Authority bonds.