Plans for proposed $235M jail in Puunene go forward

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PUUNENE - Plans for a proposed Maui Regional Public Safety Complex - or jail - in Puunene are moving forward, leaders from the state Public Safety and Accounting and General Services departments said last week.

If the 843-inmate, minimum- and medium-security jail gets funding from lawmakers, some of whom said they are leery of its design and big price tag, the multiuse facility will replace the overcrowded Maui Community Correctional Center on Waiale Road in Wailuku.

The Maui Regional Public Safety Complex is estimated to cost $235 million, said state Comptroller Russ Saito. Construction hopefully should begin in mid-2010 and be completed by the end of 2012, he said.

The 38.8-acre site is located along Mokulele Highway at the old Puunene airfield within 222 acres of state land now used by Maui County for the Maui Motor Sports Park.

However, Saito said the county told him that the only users permitted to use the land are the police and fire departments, for training. And they will work with the county to remedy that problem, he said.

This summer, there were rumors in the community that the project was not moving forward when the county initially granted the former Paradise Speedway organizers permission to re-open their dirt circle track at the Motor Sports Park.

However, county Parks and Recreation Director Tamara Horcajo said she asked the group, which has not been active for six years due to a change in leadership, to hold off on its recreational permit application until the prison situation is figured out.

Horcajo and Maui Motor Sports and Entertainment President Ed "Mavrik" Britton said they believe that the prison footprint will be where the track used to be.

"We need to get more information ourselves," Horcajo said. "I don't want them (Paradise Speedway) investing a lot of assets and work into a place, if they need to move in a couple years."

The parks director said her department has seen only draft maps of the correctional facility. So she asked Britton to hold off once the department learned his group wanted to make substantial improvements to the land, such as extensive grading. Horcajo said one concern was that the county recently spent about $500,000 removing old tires as well as trash dumped there illegally by residents.

In June, it was a parks department official who contacted the dirt track racers about getting a new recreational permit, Britton said. He said this county official told him that the new correctional facility wasn't going to happen.

The Maui News had to make several requests with the state to get information about the plans.

The paper did receive a PowerPoint presentation with some basic site plans, such as building footprints, but no conceptual designs. The information also included estimated timelines for future events and several short statements about objectives and accomplishments up to this point.

State Department of Corrections Deputy Director Tommy Johnson said staff members are meeting weekly to put together the myriad details of the project.

The Department of Accounting and General Services has scheduled an informational meeting to update the public on the facility from 6 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Maui Waena Intermediate School cafeteria. It's the second such community meeting in the past month on Maui about the project; the previous one was held with the Kihei Community Association.

One serious question about the correctional center is money. Another is zoning.

The Democratic-controlled Legislature and Republican Gov. Linda Lingle have provided about $15 million for planning and design of the facility.

And Saito said state project managers and private consultants recently completed the preliminary design documents "and are now in the pre-final design stage."

For the plans to move ahead, an environmental assessment, which is in the works, must be completed and reviewed by the public.

Actual control of the land also needs to be reverted back to the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, which Mayor Charmaine Tavares said she'd consent to in a letter written in June to the DLNR's board of directors.

Even though the Puunene site's only neighbors are motor sports enthusiasts and the Hawaii Army Air National Guard headquarters, some residents have said they don't want a "prison" there.

And it's uncertain how much support the plans will get from the Maui County Council. The Lingle administration would need conditional use permits from Maui County and the state Land Use Commission to build there. The permit requests are planned to go before the council and commission next summer, according to the Public Safety Department timeline.

In past Maui News articles and recent interviews, several Maui lawmakers said they don't like the plans' latest incarnations. It will cost way too much and the complex itself doesn't look enough like a traditional prison, said state Sen. Shan Tsutsui, who is vice chairman of the powerful Senate Ways and Means Committee.

"We are not aware of any comments made by the Legislature on the current project design," Saito said in an e-mail response to questions last week from The Maui News.

"However, the Maui Regional Public Safety Complex is not a prison," Saito wrote. "Instead, it is a facility which will replace the Maui Community Correction Center and which will house pretrial detainees, short-term sentenced jail inmates (serving one year or less) and sentenced felon inmates with less than two years toward their release. The new complex will also include the Maui Parole Office, the Maui Intake Service Center and the future construction of a sheriff's building."

State Public Safety Department Director Clayton Frank has said that the new facility would house 608 inmates within its perimeter and another 235 in work-release housing outside the secure fences. The facility also would have space for health care, drug and sex-offender treatment programs, education and vocational services and other intensive societal reintegration programs.

Tsutsui has said he does support moving the complex away from the 7 acres MCCC currently sits on in densely populated Wailuku in exchange for the abandoned sugar cane fields of Puunene.

But last year - when the public safety complex's projected cost was $16 million less than today - Tsutsui said even then that it was too expensive. And both the Senate and the House have already refused to appropriate a $50 million request by Lingle in 2008 to begin construction.

Tsutsui said that when the Public Safety Department first proposed the project seven years ago, lawmakers were told it would cost $70 million to build, and about half of the funding would come from the federal government.

In 2005, state officials told lawmakers the facility would cost up to $120 million. A year later, the estimates had jumped to $210 million, Tsutsui said.

State Rep. Joe Souki, (Kahakuloa-Wailuku-Waikapu), who sits on the House Public Safety Committee, said the last he heard was that the facility would cost $195 million. He said the plans need to be scaled down dramatically in order realistically to receive state dollars.

"The irony is that the correctional system on the Mainland is cheaper and better," Souki said. "Our system is terrible."

Tsutsui said the plans have been untenable for three years now because of lawmakers' objections to the project's price and design, and the state administration has been told that.

"We told them to go back to the drawing board," he said. "When the Department of Public Safety came to us, they showed us a campus-style prison with all separate, nonvertical buildings. It looked more like a school, not a prison."

Still, the Maui Community Correctional Center holds 100 more prisoners than it was designed to handle, with a total of about 310 inmates. Overcrowding is dangerous to staff and inmates alike, corrections experts say.

However, Tsutsui said the administration and Legislature are still "not even close" to agreement.

"I would say it's optimistic to say we are 10 years away," he said, adding that he believes there's no pressure right now to build new jails.

Tsutsui said that Hawaii's correctional system is not running at 100 percent capacity, and the administration has recently been able to return about 200 of 2,000 inmates that were staying in Mainland prisons. But some of those were women who were sexually abused by Kentucky prison officers.

By the end of this month, Lingle's administration also will close the 123-inmate Kulani Correctional Facility on the Big Island to deal with the state's budget deficit. Frank has said the state will save $2.8 million a year by shuttering the facility and potentially laying off its 76 employees.

Still, according to the PowerPoint presentation given to Kihei residents Aug. 18, the state projects an increase in Hawaii's inmate population.

House Public Safety Committee member Rep. Gil Keith-Agaran said he was told recently that the Maui facility's final plans should be done in December. Keith-Agaran said he wouldn't be surprised if the final price tag for the Maui complex tops $200 million since design is typically 10 percent of the total cost, but he also said he hasn't been "made privy to the designs."

Saito said that the proposed facility has been designed with "state of the art" security and features equal to any modern new public safety complex on the Mainland. It will be a secure and safe facility that surpasses the quality of community correction center facilities previously built in Hawaii, he said.

And his employees are working to design the project to meet LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification requirements, Saito said.

Keith-Agaran said that the new Maui facility, if it's built, could take on some of Kulani's inmates with the new designs - but MCCC sure can't, he said. Kulani was one of the better facilities in the state, with good treatment programs and specialized training for rehabilitation. Kulani's closure is a questionable decision and a blow to the inmates as well as the community members it employed, including local farmers and ranchers who sold food to the facility, he said.

Keith-Agaran said for the most part he supports the new Maui complex but wants to know more. As for Kulani, he added that he would like to see a formal investigation done into its closure.

* Chris Hamilton can be reached at chamilton@mauinews.com.