As expected, Brown County is putting the industrial building it bought for jail space last year back on the market:
The Brown County Commission purchased the building at 2914 Industrial Avenue for $4.5 million and set a self-imposed deadline of raising at least 40% of the funds needed for the total $30 million project by April 1st of 2023 in order to keep the building.
With the deadline passed and no financial help from the state legislature, the county has decided to sell the building.
”We’re still contemplating how we will go about getting rid of the building, whether it be with sealed bids or a realtor or what process we’ll use. We’re still waiting for some legal advice there,” said Brown County Commission Chair Duane Sutton [Sarah Parkin, “Brown County Is Selling Their Regional Jail Building,” KSFY, 2023.04.14].
The 2914 Industrial Avenue plant used to house Hub City Manufacturing, which operated in Aberdeen from 1892 until parent company Regal Beloit shut it down in 2021. If the county can get its $4.5M back on this industrial facility, it could buy the old Runnings building on South 5th Street for $1.16M. According to the jail planning study that HMN Architects prepared for Brown County in February 2022, the Hub City plant offered over 154,000 square feet of warehouse space and 12,000 square feet of office space, far more than the 42,334 square feet of detention space and 11,224 square feet of sheriff’s office space that the county’s optimum plan requires. At 34,169 square feet, the old Runnings building could hold two-thirds of what the county was hoping to get; plus there’s room to expand on the lot and still leave plenty of parking.
But it remains to be seen how much money the county can recoup on its failed investment. Since the county bought the Hub City property in March 2022, the prime loan rate has risen from 3.5% to 8.0%, meaning buyers will be fewer and further between. The state’s failure to support this jail project means taxpayer dollars that could have been used to improve jail conditions may now be lost in a real estate resale in a less favorable market.
Aberdeen’s feckless Legislative delegation, led by mostly useless 11-term legislator Al Novstrup, left Brown County on the hook by failing to deliver state funding for a full jail project. But blame also falls on the one-party Republican regime—over a generation of Republican governors, long-standing Republican supermajorities in the Legislature, and a GOP-controlled county commission—for failing to address and perhaps exacerbating the socio-economic conditions that lead to the crime and drug abuse that fills the Brown County jail and surrounding detention facilities to their aging rafters.
Mr. Novstrup, the elder, probably believes much like grudznick’s good friend Bob that we should rehabilitate all the druggies in the County of Brown, not incarcerate them. Mr. Novstrup is a kind and wise man, according to many, which is how he is elected over all comers.
People demand that lawbreakers get locked up.
People just don’t want to pay for a jail.
Seems to be another case of where the reach exceeds the grasp. So..we have a couple big empty buildings in Aberdeen, with money on the table, and the banks getting nervous and with Meth, pot, and DUI prosecutions being what they are, more jail space is needed. So…the county steps in to solve this private sector problem, is overwhelmed by the cost, and decides it is obviously a problem to be solved by the taxpayers of South Dakota, not the tax payers of Brown County. The money chrunchers in Pierre decide they won’t be the chumps in this deal and back out. The notion that Brown County will convert one or both of these empty structures into a new jail probably doesn’t make any fiscal sense when pencil is put to paper. Converting old buildings to use as jails is often a pipe dream…too expensive a proposition, may as well build new. So…now we’ve got two empty buildings in Aberdeen and it is time to look for a new chump.
Al should cough up the cash to buy it himself.
An indoor go kart track deluxe.
With all of the indoor space he could hold gigantic election denier rallies and grift all of the useful idiots to help pay for it.
With any luck, if there’s a little extra cash, Al
could even splurge for a haircut.
Those Presentation dorms would do just fine, location, location.
and as they discovered in Yankton, prisoners tend to be better behaved than college students ….
I’d be rolling the floor laughing out loud if the Brown County commission’s self-imposed dilemma wasn’t so tragically ironic.
The socialist South Dakota welfare state and Brown County which receives almost half of their funds from US Blue States – the commission has the gall to seek more federal welfare to build a temple to the law enforcement, police, prosecutor, prison industrial complex. At the same time, the commission and their representatives in the state government howl with faux rage for ‘truth in sentencing’ to lock up offenders longer. But when it comes to paying for incarceration — well, well, well that’s suddenly someone else’s bill, some blue staters’ bill.
Never mind trying proven penal reform that reduces prison populations and recidivism. Never mind decriminalizing personal quantities of recreational drugs Portugal showed 25 years ago that reduces drug use, drug abuse, and reduces drug-related crime. Never mind adopting prison reforms championed by Norway and others that result in a mere trickle of repeat offenders.
Mark’s correct that the Presentation dorms, AND THE CLOSED DORM at Northern are perfect places to “start”. Start, heck, the South Dakota socialists converted the Springfield campus to a prison . . . why stop there? South Dakota’s college population will decline for well over a decade — so, sarcasm here, let’s make the prison transformation of colleges the new growth industry.
I would rather spend tax money on; prenatal medical care, affordable housing, minimum basic income for low income families, medical coverage for those without. I view these as an investment in our future. Prisons become warehouses of the unwanted and every dollar spent returns nothing to society. Also, our state needs to invest in mental health facilities which help the ill learn strategies to cope with the traumas in their life.