COLUMBUS, Ga. (WRBL) -- We now know where a new Muscogee County Jail would be built – but we still don't know exactly how much it would cost.
The Columbus Council voted Tuesday night to locate a new jail on city-owned land off Cusseta Road.
The city has been talking about replacing the Muscogee County Jail for more than a decade. Tonight, the council took action that brings a new jail closer to reality.
Two weeks after consultants told the city council a new jail would cost $478 million dollars, councilors moved forward with a location.
A 25-acre city-owned site currently occupied by Public Works was selected on a 7-1 vote.
The lone dissenting vote was Councilor John Anker.
"I would really like to see us slow it down and take some developers in there and look," Anker said.
Anker was in the minority. But Councilor Charmaine Crabb said that this did not lock the council into the details.
"I think voting to approve this location right now, since it is already our property that some of those things you are concerned about can still come out," Crabb said.
The high price tag presented two weeks ago is not necessarily the final number.
"It's going to it's going to demand that council, mayor, staff does a very, very thorough job of looking for every way possible, hold down all the cost," Mayor Skip Henderson said.
Council has already approved about $2.5 million for design consultants to proceed. That money will be used for the Public Works site.
Ryan Pruett, director of Inspections and Codes told council that the jail design right now is "still very conceptual, still very early."
"We don't have every plug in the wall figured out exactly where it would go," he said. "But again, it gets more specific as far as exactly how the building would be built, how big the foundations would be, would there be deep foundations or spread foundations. All those questions would get a little more defined than we have currently have. That would give us a lot greater confidence in that budget number. We wouldn't have to carry as much contingency because in that number we provided last week was a big chunk of contingency. We would be reducing that number."
0 comments: