Joint Performance Review (JPR)
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Speaker 11
2:00
- Sit down. - Look what you're doing. - That's cool.
Unknown speaker
2:30
Members, if you'll take your seats.
We've got this thing on, this is just
Speaker 25
3:07
going to be for the presentation. How do we
turn them on? If members in the audience,
If you'll stand before I gavel in, we're going to have prayer led by Senator John Payton and ask him to remember our friend and colleague, Senator Stubblefield's family. Senator Payton, you're recognized. Bow with me, please. Our
Senator John Payton
Unverified
4:01
Father in heaven, God, we love you, and we thank you for this day. You're an awesome God, and you've definitely prepared the way before us for many generations. And, Lord, we just pray that you'd help us in this gathering, Lord, to look for your guidance.
and your wisdom. Lord, we think of our brother Gary Stubblefield and his family. Lord, it seems like a very inconvenient time for his leaving, but God, your timing is perfect. May we understand that what we do here today doesn't just impact those that are here today, but those that will be coming in the future, as we'll all have an appointment like Gary to be called home. Lord, just pray that you give us your wisdom and guidance so that we make wise decisions.
Lord, I pray that you'd give us an attitude of harmony so that we can subdue our passions and address the things before us, Lord. And pray once again for Gary's family, which by extension includes so many here. Lord, forgive us where he failed you. In Jesus'
name, amen. Called to order the Joint Performance Review Committee. I appreciate everyone being here today.
Each and every one, welcome. I would ask
that we hold talking comments down where everyone will be able to hear. Our first order of business is to approve the minutes from the October 21st, 24th meeting. I'll take a motion. Motion. Motion. Motion. Motion. Second. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Opposed? Minutes are approved next we hit consideration the motion to authorize the chairs to prove special expenses
incurred by the JPR committee to take a motion Have motion and I have second second all in favor aye opposed that motion is approved a Reason for a meeting today. We have a discussion on citizens complaint regarding Franklin County prison proposal I would just Ask their presenters to come up. We are going to
Swear in all of our presenters today That's something not all committees Can do we we do have that so if you'll come stand at the committee and I'll read you your oath Just go ahead and get in front of your chair there and hit your microphone, please If you
Speaker 39
6:48
will state your your name and your position our employer
Adam Watson. I'm a director with gravel
Speaker 40
6:56
and grit Natalie cadena executive director of gravel and
grit okay, if you will raise your right hand and Do you solemnly swear to affirm that the testimony you are about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing
but the truth? I do. Acknowledge both of you.
Please have your seat. Again, thank you for being here today, and at this time we're going to turn it over to you for your presentation.
Adam Watson
Unverified
7:34
Good afternoon, chairs and committee. My name is Adam Watson, as I said. My colleague here is Natalie
Speaker 48
7:41
Kadina. Before we get started, I want to take just a minute to thank the chairs, the vice chairs, for agreeing to set this hearing and reviewing our complaint, and to thank all the committee members present for taking the time to be here and hear us out. Ever since the governor announced the Franklin County site almost a year ago, We've consistently heard from lawmakers and state officials that citizens would have ample opportunity to be heard on this matter.
And unfortunately, it just hasn't proven to be the case. So we're extremely grateful for both your time and attention here today. It's also especially timely that we're here today in the wake of Senator Stubblefield's passing. And we're honored to be able to continue the conversation about an issue that was so vitally important to him. So our thoughts are certainly with his family and his district as they grieve his loss and celebrate his life. Turning to our complaint, in addition to the complaint itself, we've provided the committee
with an exhibit list, a timeline, 141 exhibits, and a presentation that will be on all your screens, and we'll talk through that presentation as we present our evidence. Since this is all pretty dense and voluminous, I want to go through just a couple housekeeping items so we're all on the same page before we dive into the complaint itself. If you will, you're doing good,
but slide that mic just a little bit closer to you. Is that better?
Speaker 48
9:10
First, we've been cautioned on more than one occasion, which I think is exceedingly fair, to be exceptionally careful about the veracity of what we present to lawmakers anytime we have the chance to speak with you. So the way we decided to present our complaint is in the style of a summary judgment motion. Now, kind of surprisingly to me at least, I only count three attorneys on this committee. So for those who aren't familiar, what I mean by that is we don't intend to make any factual statements to you today that aren't supported by evidence.
So whether it's documentary evidence, prior testimony, photographs, news reports, et cetera, everything we share with you will be verifiable. Some of it's going to be quick as we try and keep up with the presentation, but assuming all this technology cooperates with us, the evidence supporting each statement we make will be displayed on the screens as we talk. If you're viewing the, oh, each of those pieces of evidence will be labeled with an exhibit number on the screen, and that exhibit number corresponds to the list we provided you.
If you're viewing that electronically, each line item contains a link to the reference source material, so it's easy to review. what's looping on the screen now is an example of how to access that but we're more than happy to stick around if there are any technical issues and a quick note on technical issues a couple of our videos are freezing up but the audio is fine so it's not you if something looks frozen second we want to address what we expect of the committee given its legislative purpose and limitations we
fully understand that this committee is not a police force style investigative unit that has either the leeway or the resources to launch a full-scale "investigation" into the matters we've complained about. We filed this complaint because over the course of our research and investigation into the matters we're complaining about, we've been able to piece together facts that tell a story that indicates what we believe to be the extreme likelihood of impropriety and malfeasance in a number of instances. But the tools available to
to us as private citizens are limited by the FOIA, lack of subpoena power, and the general ease with which state officials can avoid us. So while we can tell you a good deal of the story here, there are holes that we just can't fill in on our own. And that's where we're asking the committee to come in. We strongly believe that what we know plainly constitutes smoke, and we're asking the committee to determine whether or not there are associated fires. Lastly, we hope to keep our presentation to around an hour, including the time I've already taken.
but complaint four will be about as long as complaints one through three combined and it's very dense so if the committee would like to take a break at any time that would be about the halfway mark for us and we'll remind the chairs when we get to that point we see today is the first step of uncovering the truth in this matter so depending on what you think about what you hear from us and the answers you get from the state officials in attendance we strongly encourage you not to consider this a closed matter after today's hearing.
Whether you decide that further hearings are necessary, that referrals to other investigative bodies or interim studies are appropriate, that legislative audit needs to get involved, or if you simply have additional questions or curiosities, we want you to know that the line of communication both to us and to our officials in Franklin County is always open. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Natalie to get started on complaint one and then we'll go back and forth between the two of us as we progress
Speaker 54
12:45
through good morning and thank you for being here to listen to
Speaker 56
12:48
our if you will pull your mic down and pull it a little closer to
Speaker 54
12:54
how's that that's good thank you good morning and thank you for having us today um so our first complaint is that it reads that it is improper for arkansas taxpayers to be burdened with supporting the salary of two leaders of the department of corrections on january 10th 2024 the board of corrections voted 5-2 to fire Corrections Secretary Joe Profiri via special teleconferencing meeting.
Governor Sanders immediately rehired him as her senior advisor, then appointed Lindsay Wallace as the replacement Secretary of Corrections a few weeks later. Taxpayers fund both salaries, so roughly $190,000 for both a year, and the media has well covered that there is no apparent role that Mr. Profieri serves within the governor's office. However, documentation from the governor's office lists his role as the public affairs director.
Now, by all appearances, it seems Mr. Profieri's role hasn't changed one bit since his dismissal and immediate rehiring. Internal emails reflect that months later, agency heads still defer to Mr. Profieri's leadership for matters involving corrections. Mr. Perfieri still testifies on behalf of the Department of Corrections standing in for Secretary Wallace when she's unable to answer questions regarding the new prison. So
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
14:19
why could they answer the questions on Monday, but they couldn't on Thursday?
Speaker 61
14:26
Representative Wooten, I wish I had a good answer for you
Corey Cox
Unverified
14:29
with regards to what your questions may have been to Secretary Wallace and her ability to answer those
Speaker 54
14:39
questions. I don't. Steven Veneer, the consultant allegedly running this project, addresses deliverables to the attention of Joe Perfieri. In the prior committee hearing, days earlier, when Secretary Wallace was still trusted to represent the DOC, she repeatedly responded with some form of "I don't know" to
committee members, questions at a theme in her testimony that we, and apparently some legislators have noticed all too frequently for a department head um i don't
Speaker 68
15:08
have the answers i i can't tell you the specific checks i don't know the answer to that and i just can't answer the question about how much the overall cost is going to be at
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
15:20
this point in time what we have here is a condom we don't know you don't know and apparently the governor doesn't know
Speaker 54
15:36
Secretary Wallace isn't even on this hearing's agenda to represent the DOC. Now, as to Mr. Proffiri's qualifications for either a department head or some kind of senior advisory role to the governor, the governor brought Mr. Proffiri to Arkansas out of a tumultuous run as the deputy director of Arizona's Department of Corrections.
He was passed up for the directorship after playing or failing to play a role in events such as known but ignored prison lock malfunction, leading to attacks on guards and inmates, a severely lackluster attempt at managing the COVID situation in Arizona's prison system, and a botched software rollout so full of bugs that it led to hundreds of inmates being locked up beyond their release date, which is eerily similar to the system problems at issue in Grant Hardin's misclassification and recent escape from Calico Rock's north central unit.
Mr. Profiri's personal friendships have also caused us to examine potential violations of Arkansas procurement law. On May 16th of 2024, Van Eer's executive director of justice emailed Director Laidlaw, Mr. Profiri, and several others about how excited Van Eer was to work with the state and marking the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship. The only problem here is that this is over a month prior to the state issuing the RFQ, which Vanier ultimately won.
Vanier was introduced to state officials by Matt Cate, the former head of California's corrections agency and current consultant of whom Vanier is a client. He reached out for an informal discussion despite the political hurdles that needed to be overcome before formal planning could get started. I guess it's who you know not what you know and apparently he's an old pal of Mr. Profiri. This is one of those instances where we clearly see smoke but since Mr. Profiri has
been elevated to the governor's staff FOIA is no longer an effective tool for us so we can't investigate without further assistance. Now, since he appears to still helm the ship, we thought it prudent to review his prison construction experience. When asked about his experience bringing in prison projects under budget, Mr. Perfieri responded as follows.
Speaker 75
18:04
And a follow-up. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Perfieri, you said you built three prisons under budget or within the budget that was
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
18:11
given to you? That's correct, sir. What year was that?
Speaker 78
18:18
So the last prison that we built was in 2008.
Speaker 79
18:27
Now, we're fine admitting that we aren't prison construction or
Speaker 54
18:32
construction budget management experts, but it doesn't appear that a criminal investigations manager, supervisor, special investigator, or correctional officer has anything to do with those responsibilities either, as evidenced by Mr. Proffieri's resume.
So while his resume may reflect experience in monitoring prison systems, it does not reflect even a modicum of experience designing, planning, or constructing prisons. Notably, neither does the flowery biography included with his appointment announcement. What we think is clear here is that we have an acting secretary of corrections who is plainly incapable of fulfilling the role and a fired secretary of corrections who's still doing the job, but with a reputation so bad from his previous job that Carlos Garcia, a 20 plus year corrections professional, said, Joe was doing crazy things and allowing crazy things to go on.
He's going to go to Arkansas and do the same thing. It was the same garbage you guys are going to experience. Further, in his de facto role and continued adversarial relationship with the Board of Corrections is exacerbating an already flawed secretive process that has led us here today. So who's really running the show? Is it the alleged senior advisor with a bad rap, the stand-in secretary, the embattled Board of Corrections, or the high-dollar California contractor who points the finger back at the Department of Corrections leadership while taxpayers foot their bills for booze and
first-class travel? Arkansas taxpayers are funding this incompetence, inefficiency, and potential illegality at a total clip of $377,000 a year with no clear leadership of a Corrections Department trying and failing to undertake the second most costly capital improvement project in the state's history. While we have a full appreciation for the governor's purview to appoint her own staff, this is clearly a trampling of the Board of Corrections oversight authority and a misuse of
taxpayer funds. In addition to the list I handed out to you, or you have, we, um, there are some questions that
Speaker 81
20:49
we think are raised by complaint one. Based on Mr.
Speaker 48
20:57
Perfere, or sorry, complaint number two is it's an improper use of taxpayer funds to pay a consultant for a task while simultaneously having an unqualified state agency perform the same task based on mr perfieri's alc
testimony from november of 2023 that you're about to hear the site selection process for a carceral facility in the state began in earnest of late fall of 2023 you'll also hear him note that the vendor selected is responsible for both selecting the site and
Corey Cox
Unverified
21:29
ensuring community buy-in that the vendor who proposes to build the facility will have to inform us of the location and community buy-in with regards to where the prison will be located. That process is underway. We're hoping
Speaker 86
21:43
to issue an RFP sometime in the beginning of the new
Adam Watson
Unverified
21:54
year. Over the next several months, rather than a vendor, officials from TSS, which is
Speaker 48
22:00
another acronym now, apologies for not updating that, in conjunction with DOC officials and governor's office staff worked to narrow down sites across the state that fit parameters, however fuzzy, developed by DOC.
On July 3rd, 2024, an intern with GIS found an online listing for the property located at 6310 Arkansas 215 in Charleston. That site was put under contract at the end of July of 2024. Simultaneously with the site selection process that was being undertaken by state agencies, on June 25th, 2024, DOC issued an RFQ for owner's representative services for this project. that RFQ specifically referenced the need for the owner's representative
to, quote, assist in the project site selection. These services are also contemplated in the contract between Veneer and DOC. However, well in advance of the contract even being finalized, site selection had already been completed, however inadequately, by state agencies with no specialized construction, workforce, or prison experience. On July 22nd, 2024, three full months before Veneer's contract's execution, GIS Director Shelby Johnson emailed his colleagues stating, prison site selection done.
And as you saw a moment ago, the property was under contract just three days later. It wasn't until October 14th, 2024, that AOC even reviewed the contract. And in response to siting questions at that meeting, Director Laidlaw made false assertions to the committee, both that the site had not yet been selected and that
Representative Joy Springer
Unverified
23:44
site selection. Good morning. I'm just curious, where is this proposed facility going to be built? We
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
23:52
have not selected a site yet, so we're still working on that.
In fact, the owner's representative will help us with finalizing our options for the best site that's most suitable for the facility.
Representative Joy Springer
Unverified
24:04
Can you tell us any place all over the state of Arkansas? Is
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
24:09
it any particular area of the state? We have looked at
many, many sites. We're working with criteria for the facility, which involves workforce numbers, access to emergency services, infrastructure. There's quite a bit of criteria. workforce is a is a heavily driving criteria for the site as well so I guess I'm still trying to
Representative Joy Springer
Unverified
24:33
see where it's limited to so could that be all over the state could be anywhere in the state or do
Speaker 96
24:40
you know some defining we've looked at sites
Speaker 48
24:48
all over the state yes ma'am all right thank you representative the state closed on the Franklin County property three weeks after that testimony to summarize that's 22 days from finding the listing to site selection done and under contract three months prior to contracting with the firm intended to handle site selection
there were multiple other sites considered for this project but unlike those sites the state did not put the franklin county site under an option contract in fact they had instructed their broker to put a Fort Smith property under an option just seven days prior to locating the Franklin County listing. For the Franklin County site, they didn't use a broker and simply entered into a regular purchase agreement. Thus, not only did the state agency failures by both GIS and DBA result in selection of
an unfeasible property for the project, the improper contracting mechanism negates the state's reasoning for intentionally hiding the site selection from the public. In other words, there was no danger of a bidding war breaking out for
Speaker 100
25:53
a property under a purchase contract. In regards to who knew what and when, ultimately it was important for the taxpayers in regards to ensuring that there wasn't an escalation in price and a bidding war to keep it quiet.
Speaker 3
26:12
Yeah, the community wasn't buying it that night either. Considering the timing of
Adam Watson
Unverified
26:21
the owner's representative contract and the state's subsequent closing
Speaker 48
26:26
on the Franklin County property, coupled with Director Johnson's email regarding the finality of site selection months prior, it's plainly impossible that veneer could have legally participated in any meaningful manner in
the site selection process this means that taxpayers have paid in duplicate for both veneer services which it could never have legally performed and the salaries of a litany of top level state agency staff for the months of time working through the site selection process more importantly by failing to let experts conduct this critical critical piece of research geared toward finding a property that is actually feasible for this type of facility, the state finds itself here today, five failed votes short of funding, and all but begging for a design contract
that has already slashed criteria to cut unnecessarily bloated costs rather than a design based on the state's needs, and at serious odds with the very community which it will desperately need to patrol these cells. These substantial oversights have undoubtedly cost taxpayers far more than just duplicate payments, and the state is left having purchased a property that is plainly not suitable for the facility it intends to build. Here are a couple of the questions that we think are relevant to
Speaker 103
27:47
this section while Natalie gets ready for Section 3.
Speaker 54
28:01
So in complaint three, we ask, is expending taxpayer funds on a capital project without funding for such a project is irresponsible and improper? As we sit here today, the state has either spent, committed to spend, or is on the cusp of asking the legislature to approve the spending of tens of millions of dollars on a project for which the legislature has repeatedly refused to even create an appropriation.
Now, to dispel some misinformation that was going around after session, the legislature did not approve $75 million specifically for this project, a project which had not yet even been thought up when the legislature appropriated that $75 million in connection with a 498-bed expansion of Calico Rock's north-central unit. Notably, that appropriation was specifically for prison expansion, not new prison construction. Semantics, I guess, we note this for two reasons.
One is to dispel any information indicating that there was even tacit approval for the current project by the current legislature. And second, to note that those figures place the cost of that expansion at about $150,000 a bed, while the math on 3,000 beds at $825 million is almost double at $275,000 a bed. And that's only if you believe the one-page estimate Veneer came up with over a three-day weekend in March.
Nonetheless, appropriately or otherwise, the $75 million that is currently being drawn from this project represents less than 10% of that estimate. We think DBA's minimum standards are clear. Departments are responsible for ensuring they have sufficient appropriation and funding for the capital improvement project prior to the solicitation of bids. we also think Arkansas law is clear for projects of this state or any agency of this state amount appropriated means funds currently available for the
project prior to the opening of any bids common sense should also prevail here how is plowing ahead with a project that lacks any guarantee of funding and spending 75 million dollars on paperwork anything more than an attempt to box the legislature into a corner. We believe the intent here is clear because we've heard the argument before. Back in December of last year Senator Gilmore told us in reference to the mere three million dollars the state had already spent on the property that officials needed to be good stewards of
taxpayer money and there is a very slim likelihood that we would look at any other land. Ostensibly indicating that once more once money is spent on a project that the project must move forward continuing with that logic is not difficult but it becomes all the more pressing and pressure inducing when it's 75 million at stake instead of just 3 million which the residents of Franklin County had offered to buy back the land pressure cooker aside spending 75
million on an unfunded project puts us precariously close to repeating a mistake that South Dakota just made. After dumping more than fifty four million dollars into the project South Dakota scrapped plans for their new fifteen hundred bed eight hundred and twenty five million dollar prison strangely half the number of beds we expected the same amount to get us. South Dakota pivoted to a more inclusive and transparent process that prioritized community acceptance logistical feasibility and fiscal responsibility
in selecting a more appropriate site for their project. While, of course, we would like to see Arkansas do the same, the taxpayers would certainly like to see the state have the forethought to do so before we're $75 million in the hole. Overspending is overspending, but we think it's especially egregious when there has been so much disinformation spread about the true budget for this project. In a span of just four days this past spring, the project cost ballooned to almost double what the executive branch had been selling the public and the legislature for almost two years.
Not only did the $470 million dollars prove to be false, but DBA had explicitly told the governor's office in writing as early as December of 23 that budget would not deliver 3,000 beds. Perhaps even more troubling, Senator Hester noted that the cost for a 3,000 bed would be $750 million in 2022 before Governor Sanders even took office. What
Speaker 108
32:44
numbers are we talking about when we say we need those 1,000 beds
Speaker 109
32:50
so we can alleviate the responsibility from our local sheriff's departments? Well, I think
Speaker 111
32:55
the Department of Corrections is saying maybe 1,000 beds.
Senator Bart Hester
Unverified
32:58
I think that the information that I'm getting is saying we might need up to 3,000 or 3,500 beds, but a 3,000-bed prison would cost us about
Speaker 54
33:10
$750 million. Coupled with the fact that WDD's initial program study returned an estimated cost of $1.2 billion in late summer of 2023,
we don't believe there's any possibility that the $470 million was ever a reasonable budget for this project, especially not as the selected site. Conveniently, when instructed to go back to the drawing board, WDD was somehow able to shave $730 million off the estimate to match the governor's announcement. So it's no surprise that we're again shaving down the design to match the alleged budget instead of constructing the most appropriate type of facility for the state's needs.
This is all exceedingly troublesome, given that the governor's initial letter to the JBC requested only a $330 million appropriation, which, like the current $75 million, would leave the project woefully short of full funding. Meaning the legislature and the public were sold the budget the state should have well known was insufficient until the legislature balked, then the estimate raised by 76% in four days. The pattern seems clear.
Under budget to secure funding in order to force the legislature's hand when it comes to approval of the remaining funds that will actually be needed to finish this project. With Senator Hester's $750 million estimate, the $1.2 billion estimate from WDD, DBA's insistence that $470 million wouldn't cut it, and the widespread speculation that this is really a $1.5 billion project, this behavior causes grave concerns that we would remain in this cycle of underfunding
leading to manufactured legislative pressure even had the legislature approved the governor's appropriation request in session. Again, overspending is overspending, regardless of the amount, and it's bad enough for the state in its own right. But what really deserves examination here is the process. If we have an executive engaging in a concerted effort to strong arm the legislature into funding capital projects, the veracity of and motive behind every statement from the executive in connection with such a project should be called into question and carefully examined.
And as to our complaint, that starts with the funds already expended prior to legislative approval. Here are some questions relevant to this section, and before I pass it to Adam for the last section of our presentation, This is a reminder that if you wanna take a break, this would be the halfway point.
Speaker 48
35:49
- All right, section four, and it's dense. We try to do our best with keeping visuals on the screen for you all to follow along, but apologies in advance.
So failing to conduct property diligence on real property prior to its purchase is irresponsible and improper. So I want to start by acknowledging that, yes, we've seen the 47-page site assessment prepared by GIS and offered as Exhibit D2 to this hearing. We've also presented it as Complainance Exhibit A, and that's how we're referring to it in our presentation, just for clarity. We contend that the information we're presenting to you in this section clearly indicates that pulling data on a parcel of real property does not constitute the extent of pre-purchase due diligence required as stewards of taxpayer dollars
to determine whether such parcel is feasible for any particular project, especially not for the second most costly capital improvement project in state history. If it did, we wouldn't be sitting here today with some of the most basic, fundamental questions about this project unanswered. Worse yet, not only was proper due diligence not conducted, but the state's internally created and ever-shifting criteria were ultimately watered down to the point that they might as well have been abandoned altogether in the final site selection.
So let's start by looking a little bit at that criteria. First and foremost, the state's criteria for the prison was a moving target throughout the search process. So we're going to walk through those and chart them before we get into the specifics of the Franklin County site and how it matches up. The earliest version of the criteria we can find, and therefore the most inconsistent with the state's ultimate site selection, is back to Mr. Perfieri's testimony in front of ALC on November 17, 2023.
Corey Cox
Unverified
37:35
With respect to the prison construction and those 3,000 beds, Arkansas' history of prison construction has been through the use of donated land. Often donated land within the state of Arkansas to build prisons is not at a premium. It costs a lot to improve that land to make it suitable for an infrastructure to go on top of it. Additionally, it's not in the most right location to allow for a workforce that can immediately staff that prison as well as a sustainable workforce that can maintain the facility over
the long haul as far as having appropriate staffing levels. So I'm deviating from that past behavior as the status quo I do not believe has served the state of Arkansas well with regards to the locations of prisons in the state of Arkansas. I have specific criteria associated with where that prison should be constructed, and it has to do with, like I said, a sustainable workforce. It's got to be within a certain proximity to a level three trauma center. I have to ensure quality of work life for those employees that work at that facility,
which means that the commute has to be reasonable from their homes and that it has to be close to highways, and the land has to be suitable for construction of such a facility. In addition, community has to embrace the fact that a prison would go into their community or near their community. So all those factors will be associated and written into the procurement action that the vendor who proposes to build the facility will have to inform us of the location and community buy-in with regards to where the prison will be located.
That process is underway. We're hoping to issue an RFP sometime. in
Speaker 86
39:16
the beginning of the new year so we'll go ahead and chart those out and
Speaker 48
39:23
next we have criteria outlined in december of 2023 by director laidlaw with additions from mr cooper with doc and those will be on the chart so we don't have to spend a lot of time on the email we'll put them on there the next set comes from a dba presentation in january of 2024 which largely
mirrors mr cooper's list from december with the addition of a county population requirement and a workforce formula provided by a consulting workforce expert put those on the chart next which this is the last version documented prior to the site purchase in march of 2024 we see another dba presentation that changes the approach a bit rather than laying out specific criteria it notes that quote sites are evaluated according to how they meet criteria overall rather than any
single factor alone put that on the chart and lastly we see the primary search criteria accompanying the doc site assessment that director johnson emailed to the boc just the evening before their vote to accept the franklin county property these criteria notably omit any specific information instead opting for language such as quote availability of primary infrastructure and quote proximity to emergency services but we'll go ahead and chart out what we can so let's briefly ignore which criteria the franklin county
property does and doesn't meet and just look at the moving goal posts the franklin county property was first identified via an online listing by gis on july 3rd 2024 for the 20 months prior real tangible and quantifiable criteria existed for the location of the proposed prison. As you can see by this comparison, not only did the final post-purchase quote criteria become so amorphous that just about any large tract of land would have sufficed, but critical elements such as
distance to an interstate, cost of infrastructure improvements, and most importantly, community acceptance were completely omitted. Now, Secretary Wallace maintains that the state did everything it was able to prior to purchasing the property.
Speaker 67
41:38
What I do understand to be factual is that everything that we could do before we purchased
Speaker 121
41:44
the land was done in terms of checking things
Speaker 48
41:50
out. However, nothing in the purchase agreement for the property prohibits any study the state would
have wished to conduct during the due diligence period. They even went so far as to extend the standard 90-day due diligence period through the day before closing. Secretary Wallace's position has proven false by the state's own actions in beginning to conduct the very studies it should have and could have conducted before purchase six months after the fact. And our point is essentially proven by this admission that reports being delivered on June 25, 2025, almost eight months
after the close of the due diligence period constitute quote necessary due diligence the bottom line here is this watering down your site criteria to fit the parcel of land that you want to purchase is the opposite of due diligence it's setting the doc up for failure and that's before we even address the shortcomings of the franklin franklin county property when compared to the final site criteria which we'll start going through now So out of these six different versions of property criteria over a year-plus period,
let's try to walk through these with a focus on the versions of the criteria that are both quantifiable and make the most realistic sense as they relate to the needs of an adequate site for a megaprison. We'll check off the first two in the state's favor. We don't need to waste time here. It's not within 60 miles of an existing DOC facility, and it's not in a floodplain. So the next is urban versus rural. While the site is not within city limits, which meets Director Laidlaw's early draft criteria, we would tend to agree with the DBA presentation from March 1st, 2024, that
many rural locations, including this one, are completely ruled out, both based on lack of infrastructure, which we'll cover in more detail down the list. As further support for that opinion, we would refer to the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission's report recent recommendations that tdcj develop a plan to close its rural facilities that can't be staffed so for us this category gets an x workforce and this one is dense there's some math
so apologies again we think each of the criteria laid out in this category is pretty important but we're going to start with an easy one a county with 30,000 plus population franklin county has 17,097 people. So that crosses that off the list. Next, and probably more important, is a location that's immediately and sustainably staffable, taking into account the quality of work-life balance to employees. So let's take a look at the workforce formula that Director Johnson received
in response to his reaching out to a workforce expert with questions about how to evaluate potential sites. That formula is explained on screen, but we have to modify a couple things to fit this site. First, the expert here is relying on manufacturing as the recruiting base for her 20% participation rate. So we need to adjust that to fit this project. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists correctional officers and jailers as accounting for 0.2% of the workforce and all
protective service occupations is 2.2%. If we're exceedingly generous, disregard the lower participation security positions, and anticipate that our current environment doubles actual labor participation in the entire industry, we can just round up and use a 5% participation rate. Then, to compare apples to apples, we need to remove the experts' 50% reduction in population to calculate labor force because the state's comparison numbers are all ready to total labor
force as opposed to total population. So what that means is the total labor force needed is the number of positions to be filled times the number of candidates you need per position divided by the participation rate in the industry. The appropriate formula for evaluating the site per the state's expert can be noted mathematically as you see on the screen so when we plug in the variables that we know to staff this prison and look at the experts
criteria her optimum scenario allows for 50 candidates per position looking to be filled when you run the math that gives us a required labor force of 800,000 her Minimally acceptable scenario is 25 candidates per position that returns a needed labor force of 400,000 The entire labor force in the entire five-county area surrounding the Franklin County site is 108,784
Based on the state's own site assessment the labor force is short over 291,000 workers for the experts minimally acceptable criteria And that would be far worse if we were looking at just the 30-mile drive shed. Where the math gets even more telling is scoring the reality of the site's regional labor force against the expert scoring scale. For this, we have to do a little bit of algebra and change the equation to solve for candidates per position.
We do that by multiplying our participation rate by the labor force available, then dividing by the number of positions needing to be filled. And mathematically, that looks like this. Again, when we plug in our known quantities, 6.79 candidates per position is our result. And if you check the expert scoring scale above, it only awards candidate scores down to 25 candidates per position. The site scores a zero out of 10.
Look, it took us a while to work out all that math and apparently it was hard for Director Johnson too, which totally makes sense to us. Again, we dispute that GIS should have ever been doing this kind of evaluation in the first place, but it's clear that even when getting an expert's position on the site score, an expert's opinion that the site score is bottomed out for workforce, the state promptly ignored the data. All of that math doesn't even address the inherent conflict in the state's assessment data.
On the left, we see a depiction of the 30-mile drive shed surrounding the site, reflecting a labor force of, which is 18 plus population, of 127,395, while the entire regional workforce map on the right shows a labor force of only 108,784. Because the entire drive shed falls within the region but doesn't encompass the entire region, it's plainly impossible for the drive shed to have a larger labor force than the region as a whole. Notably though, even with the inflated figure listed on the drive shed map, the experts
formula still returns the same results. The site ranks a zero out of ten. That's sorry that's right there and look we've we've already heard the talk about reducing the number of beds at this facility from 3,000 to 1,000 to save face so for clarity the math still results on a zero out of ten. These are the kinds of massive shortcomings that neither a pay bump or a new bridge are going to solve however you want to slice it the workforce category gets an x for this location
so services has a lot of different categories on it so we're going to walk through a couple of them and they're we're not going to talk about landfills but proximity to a trauma center distance from a hospital those things are important for for a prison so hospitals as the site assessment shows the site is indeed 19 miles to the nearest hospital which is just within the 25 mile criteria It also correctly reflects that the closest level three trauma center is Mercy Fort Smith, which clocks in at 27 miles, or a 38-minute drive.
We can't definitively say whether that fits into Mr. Perfieri's criteria of, quote, within a certain proximity, but it sure seems prudent to us to be closer than the better part of an hour drive from a trauma center when you're running a prison. Here, the site assessment clearly has the data, so we don't know and can't say whether the state considered it just good enough or didn't consider it at all. Fire departments. This is an area where a GIS assessment just doesn't present the full story of the
reality of the site. What's left off of the fire department's name on this map other than by acronym is that each and every one of these are volunteer staffed and all but one is specifically designated as a rural fire department. what that means is that they're mostly intended for hay baler and brush fires and they look like this this is the nearest one to the site and look we're not disparaging our firefighters we love them but neither of the two gentlemen
that work at this facility are gonna put a dent in a prison fire all of that That routing analysis also omits that all of these fire stations would be solely reliant on transported water, given that the nearest fire hydrant is 6.8 miles away, and that is a lot of hose to unroll. Law enforcement. So I don't have, this is one of those that I don't have documentation to back it up, so you're welcome to take my word for it or ignore me.
But one of the points specifically consistently brought up by our community is that Charleston is a quiet, peaceful town. Even its motto is where serenity prevails. And we don't have police patrols in the city past midnight. More importantly and quantifiably,
Speaker 126
52:13
for both county and local law enforcement services, the
Speaker 2
52:18
state admitted in the town hall that the prison will cannibalize local law enforcement for at least several years before it levels out. The site is also on the wrong side of the
Speaker 48
52:38
river from the sheriff's office.
Bottom line, between distances, law enforcement cannibalization by the prison, and an already existing critical workforce issues that we just discussed, your response times are going to be less than ideal, to say the least. All in all, it doesn't appear that any single one of these categories sufficiently meets the desired criteria, and certainly when taken as a whole, the property fails the test of the services criteria category.
and we're giving it an X. Interstate access. So what you're seeing on the screen is a video of the drive from the nearest interstate exit, which is I-40 in Ozark, to the proposed site. This video is at 10 times speed. You won't see a shoulder, a passing lane, or a pit stop past Ozark for that whole video. While you watch that, let's take a look at the criteria. Pretty uniformly easy access to I-40 is noted and that's further quantified as within
two miles of the interstate this site is 23.3 miles from that exit at its nearest point that means for any potential employee using I-40 to communicate to commute to a job here that's a 34-minute drive after they exit the interstate it doesn't exactly factor in well to that work-life balance that Mr. Perfieri discussed back in 2023. Let's see how far we are. So we're not even halfway there yet. And remember, this is 10 times speed.
So anecdotes aside, this site is over 10 times the existence desired from the interstate and clearly fails this category. We'll add an X when we get there, I guess. We don't have to watch the whole thing, but it's beautiful country. This is what I couldn't show you in the beginning. in the middle of the video it's the map showing 34 minutes and 23.3 miles from the interstate so for we're going to give that an x I think pretty clearly infrastructure is the the next
category on our criteria list and the first of that is wastewater so on-site wastewater treatment facilities are nothing new to prisons in this state however no evaluation has been made for the cost escalation for the construction of a treatment facility versus a site with public sewer available. Likewise, no pre-purchase considerations were made for the potential environmental impact for neighboring properties Onion Creek flows through and their potential exposure to the
prison's discharge, which the site assessment at least puts a number on at 127 properties. Moreover, despite warnings that Clean Water Act issues were identified on the property, the state failed to conduct a 404 Wetland Act designation evaluation until six months after it purchased the property. And we've seen no evidence of even a plan to conduct an environmental impact study. So despite, quote, wastewater treatment feasible,
being one of the few items included in the final search criteria, The official site assessment omits any relevant information about such feasibility. Electricity. 8,000 to 10,000 amps is a massive amount of power, which makes sense. 3,800 people on the side of a mountain is effectively a bigger city than exists in any direction for miles around. Similarly, the state site assessment fails to meaningfully address this category,
Possibly, because the final search criteria doesn't list 8 to 10,000 amps with two sources, it simply lists electricity available. What the site assessment does show is that there are not two sources available. There's one transmission line owned by OG&E and services provided by Arkansas Valley Electric. It also notes that residential service is specified, meaning that this isn't dual or three-phase power running through beefed-up and backed-up substations. This is rural, residential, basic power.
What it does reflect is the depiction of a high voltage line bisecting the property. Thankfully, somebody at the state has realized that they can't build under those lines and has inquired with OG&E about simply moving them. I guess that's an easy thing to do, I'm not sure. But this wasn't until three months after the purchase, and comes at an unknown cost even though these easements were readily available and constitute title encumbrances that are a basic facet of any pre-closing title commitment review process.
Roads. Curiously, we don't see road criteria referenced outside of kind of cursory references to needing paved highways, but we're including it here, one, because it's included on the site assessment and two because it's something that's critical to consider for any massive-scale construction project which ultimately will have hundreds of entries and exits every single day in the site assessment we see a few of the highways in the area along with average daily traffic counts as of 2019 so five
year old data seems a bit outdated to us but since this really isn't telling us anything other than existing traffic counts I'm not sure that really matters much what's much more important than track current traffic counts are future anticipated ones coupled with both the quality and integrity of the highways and potential need for improvement though on march 20th 2025 we heard mr perfiri testify in front of the joint budget committee that quote the roadways there are no different than the roadways anywhere in the state
Corey Cox
Unverified
58:39
roadways my understanding of roadways are the roadways there are no different than the roadways anywhere in the state they're built to a specific standard and there's no issue associated with whatever load that is going to be necessary to construct this facility with this those roadways those roadways are no different than any roadway to any facility that we currently have in the state of
Speaker 48
59:05
Arkansas. Rather coincidentally, at the very same time Mr. Perfiri was testifying, RDOT was
drafting an email regarding the major upgrades needed to the roadways prior to construction and its associated traffic. And they note a minimum cost of $500,000 a mile for those improvements. Clearly, all roads in Arkansas are not the same, and clearly, judging from the conflicting information given five months after purchasing the property, the state did not fully evaluate the roads, or the anticipated impact on the roads, or the cost implications of needing
improvements to them. Subtopically to roads, bridges are one of the most glaring examples of why simply pulling map data does not constitute proper due diligence. On the site assessment, you see a total of two weight-restricted posted bridges mapped and no other bridges in the area. And that's 100% accurate, straight from RDOT's records. However, what you don't see is that RDOT defines a bridge and therefore only maintains records on "bridges" that are over 20 feet in length.
Now because RDOT doesn't maintain the data, we found it for ourselves. Again, we'd love for you to take our words for it, but if you want to come out and count, we'll follow along with you. Based on our accounts, there are 259 either short bridges or culverts less than 20 feet along the highways depicted in this map. And they have no RDOT records or inspections associated for public access. If I were a betting man, I'd wager that our county judge has some thoughts on the quantity and size of loads that are going to be traversing these crossings.
So to the elephant in the room, water. Look, I think everybody here has read the news and the reports on water, so we're not going to belabor the point. But we do want to make sure we're briefly all on the same page. The state site assessment merely includes a waterline map, and for reasons that are unclear to us, some pictures of area water towers, which would be insufficient to service the prison for even a single day. Again, relying on map data and a barely cursory email from ADH showing 3 million gallons of excess capacity in Ozark's water system,
the state checked the minuscule criteria of, quote, water available off of its list. I don't think I need to explain in great detail that you can have a billion gallons of excess capacity. If you don't have access to the ability to treat or a mechanism to deliver a billion gallons, you might as well have nothing. So here we sit, Fort Smith is a no-go, we all know the $50,000 test wells didn't pan out, which state water experts find even the prospect of doubtful.
The well experts say deeper isn't better, and there hasn't even been chatter of a hydrogeologic study to protect the scant water that the neighbors actually can access. And no one's even bothered to call Ozark, who, by the way, has publicly stated that they can't do it and don't support it. Folks, our neighbors have been screaming at the tops of their lungs that there's no water on that mountain since they first heard the governor's announcement over KDYN's airwaves last Halloween.
Even if, by some miracle, the water situation were to sort itself out tomorrow, the current set of circumstances bears out the heart of this complaint. The state did not do its homework. This is even more telling as the amount of water needed is a known quantity and there's no lack of 57 million dollar design contract to hide behind or at least there shouldn't be and if the murmurs we're hearing are true it boggles our minds that the remedy sought by our conservative state government for its own lack of due diligence could be turning to federal welfare
for a bailout the site fails this criteria categorically and objectively cannot be the best place in the state to attempt to build this facility so it gets an x okay those were a couple dense ones so the next are more straightforward and apologies for getting into the weeds but i think it was necessary on a couple of those points um so size and topography is next for size over somewhere between 76 and 300 acres check that's easy uh topography relatively flat which
I don't know seems important when you're building something that folks like to try to escape if anyone knows anything about contour lines and maps that's not flat relatively or otherwise so I guess since these are kind of combined criteria we'll do a check and an x and give it a half point locale super easy here don't even have a slide for you Franklin County is not any of those preferred locations. So that's an X. Soil reports. So this item is listed on as critical,
a critical criteria and has information pulled from USDA data on the site assessment. However, just a little bit of experience with industrial real estate informs our assumption that the intent and useful preliminary report here is a geotechnical report. Again, a true feasibility study would have revealed this and conducted the appropriate test immediately, as evidenced by the fact that the state did eventually conduct this testing six months after it purchased the property.
While the official preliminary geotechnical itself is itself preliminary, and its introduction notes that a final geotechnical investigation and report should be conducted, Veneer's cover letter does note that quote some mitigation measures are expected and will have cost implications so here again the documents prove our point stopping the site site search and purchasing a property without full investigation escalates cost and without evaluating this site against
more appropriate ones the state will never know how much more it has to spend simply by virtue of its poor site selection so for us this gets an x but we understand it's kind of amorphous and we made an assumption so we're going to be just leaning it and give it a check community acceptance so if you've been following the list which I know is is tough with how much we're covering you've already noticed we skipped one really we just went out of order because who wants to end with soil studies I guess um look in no uncertain terms Mr. Perfury testifies to AOC
that community acceptance is a must for this type of facility
Corey Cox
Unverified
1:06:00
in addition community has to embrace the fact that a prison would go into their community or near their community so all those factors will be associated and written into the procurement action that the vendor who proposes to build the facility will have to inform us of the location and community buy-in with regards to where the prison will be located. Then it's never spoken of again.
Speaker 48
1:06:31
Just a few weeks ago our Senate President Pro Tem gave an interview where he stated that not only is the reality that a majority of the people in our community accepting and supportive of this prison, but that the ones who aren't want to see violent criminals walking our streets. A majority of the people in
Senator Bart Hester
Unverified
1:06:50
that area are for this prison. There are a few that oppose it.
Look, there's always a few people, they oppose prisons. They want violent criminals walking the street.
Speaker 48
1:07:03
Ladies and gentlemen, my community has absolutely been put through the ringer with the level of dismissal disrespect and denigration shown to it by the state throughout this process and i cannot emphasize enough how patently false that statement is the best evidence i can give to you of this is the fact that city councils for every municipality surrounding the franklin county site and the front franklin county quorum court have signed resolutions opposing this project
and this is what the streets and our small towns have looked like since last november in small towns and rural communities in arkansas we still understand that the best way to gather information or opinions on something is just to get folks in the same room and have a conversation with them instead the state chose to cut us out of the process and ignore this vital requirement to the project's success in case you haven't had a look behind me a few of our friends and neighbors have joined us for this hearing so if you have any doubts whatsoever about the level of community
acceptance for this project each and every one of them would be more than happy to discuss it with you offline at any time for us this gets the biggest x out of all of these so we're done with going through those we can score it that comes out to four and a half generously of the 12 categories that this site satisfies and none of the critical categories that doesn't paint a pretty picture especially if we're concerned as mr perfiri was about the sheer
increase in cost and time required to force this poorly selected site so poorly selected that even director laidlaw twice emailed colleagues noting that the site was not viable just days before director johnson's email that site selection was complete so if you find any assertion that the state conducted property diligence is true then it must follow that they have consistently ignored the facts that any such due diligence
uncovered well we can't make motivations we can't make assumptions about their motivations we can review the facts of the matter and the facts clearly demonstrate that despite the rampant insistence to the contrary this site is by no means the best site in the state for a new prison it's less than well equipped it's less than ill-equipped for a prison facility and it presents a myriad of out-of-the-ordinary barriers to building a new large-scale prison the state is arguing that somehow it
doesn't know what the design for the project is and that it cannot determine answers to feasibility related questions until this legislature approves a 57 million dollar design contract but it does know that this is the best property in the state for that project. These are plainly mutually exclusive ideas and Mr. Perfury said as much back in 2023 when the plan was to go about this project the proper way and bring in a design professional before site selection to secure community acceptance. In contrast this project has been
done backward from the start. The state selected the site, then hired an owner's rep, and now seeks legislative approval to spend $57 million to retroactively rubber stamp its bad decisions. At the end of the day, the work the state did just doesn't meet the high bar of due diligence. The information it gathered doesn't indicate site suitability for the project, and nothing done to date constitutes a feasibility study. Spending nearly $3 million of taxpayer monies without checking these boxes is a misuse of taxpayer funds.
Alleging that we need to spend $57 million more to check these boxes is reckless. And the consequence is more than wasted dollars. It's the loss of credibility, time, and trust at the very moment when these same state leaders claim they were doing all of this to solve a pressing crisis. So for the last time, there's a couple questions on your screen that we think are relevant to this section of the complaint. That's all I have for this section, but before I pass it back to Natalie for just a couple closing comments,
just for me, I'd like to thank the chairs and the committee again for your time and attention and the opportunity to be here and present all this to you today.
Speaker 54
1:11:51
push your microphone please thank you is that better okay i hope what we've shown you here today solidifies the fact that we aren't here as obstructionists in the way of progress we aren't bringing you purely nimby arguments because we're upset about having our way of life fundamentally
altered and we can we certainly aren't here because we somehow want to see dangerous criminals walking the streets. We're here because any process that leaves a government in this kind of direct and consistent conflict with its citizens, some of its most supportive citizens no less, deserves to be examined and corrected for future iterations. From our perspective, this project has been the perfect storm of lack of transparency, executive overreach,
incompetence, and dishonesty. We believe we've shown you ample evidence of all of four categories of behavior in today's presentation. While we were preparing for today's hearing in a moment of sheer exasperation at the monumental task of condensing our research into a reasonable presentation, I commented to Adam that we could have another month to prepare and a full day to present, and we still couldn't cover everything in this story. Similarly, a journalist who came and spent a week with us in Franklin County to cover the story remarked at the end of her trip that should one choose to do so, an investigative journalist could make an entire career out of just this project.
What we've shown you today is a fraction of what we've uncovered, and all of this is just from some Google searches and FOIA requests. Arkansas deserves the full story. They deserve honesty, transparency, and accountability from their government. And if nothing else is clear today, what has become blindingly obvious over the last year is that they aren't going to get any of that without your help. We both know this was a lot of information, so we want to again thank you for conducting this hearing
and for your time and willingness to listen. We're happy to take any questions you might have either now
or at any point in the future. Thank you Thank you.
I will take questions today as Thank you if if y'all will again, I understand the passion I understand good presentation, but we're we'll refrain from
those things I i will take questions from committee and non-committee members we will
also monitor time and try to be as fair with that as we can so first up senator king you're recognized thank you mr chair i want to let
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
1:14:47
you know that the water i provided there on the table for you To make sure I know what these long
presentations can be in the water, I just want everybody to know that Brian King is on record as providing more drinking water there than they found at the Franklin County site for 3,800 people.
So, you know, Senator Stubfield and I had tons of conversations about this. We had a lot of conversations about cattle. You know, we talked about the water, you know, and people look at the NIMBY lie that has been out there that has continued to be told. You know, we looked at a cattle, if we were putting a 3,800 head feedlot out there, before we purchased the property, we would have done due diligence and made 1,000% sure that that was there, or at least, at the very least, purchased the property with contingency basis that you would find it.
You know, you talked about 96, I mean, I've drove that several times. You know, what you didn't see in that video, folks, is there's grass growing up in that highway. I mean, there's literally the whole thing will have to be resurfaced. The other thing is, too, you know, with Senator Hester's comments about you just want dangerous people. I've been in politics long enough. If you're right on the facts and the truth, the best thing your critics are going to do, go to it in politics today, is lie about your position.
Franklin County, all my counties, passed jail taxes. They have made commitments to lock up better people. So I just am proud of you guys for, number one, doing more research than what Joe Perfieri did on trying to find the right site location and not dispel this thing of just being a NIMBY, and I don't want it
in my area. So thank you very much for doing your presentation. We're happy to hear
Speaker 117
1:16:31
you be here, and thank you for listening to it.
Chair
Unverified
1:16:37
Representative Brown, you're recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:16:42
at some point in your presentation towards the beginning, you made some statements about the $75 million that was appropriated for the Calico Rock expansion back in 2022. And then you followed up with, I think the quote was funds were expended prior to legislative approval or otherwise kind of insinuated there was some misspending of that money. My understanding was, was that Act 151 of 2023, that money was reappropriated back to Department of Corrections for capital improvement
projects. So are you saying that that law did not reappropriate that money back or I don't understand
Speaker 117
1:17:13
that? No, I think what we're mainly saying is that spending $75 million on a
Speaker 48
1:17:18
project where the budget is $825 million is inappropriate. I just thought it was notable that that money was initially specifically appropriated for prison expansion, not new prison construction. Follow up, Mr. Chair. But it'd be fair to say
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:17:33
that the money was reappropriated after there was the fight on prison expansion is that not correct sure and specifically i think i recall
that the governor's office wanted to go ahead and expand some of the prisons we got beds at prisons we have and the department of corrections pretty much shot that down and then got into a lawsuit and at that point it was
Speaker 48
1:17:50
then proposed to build a new prison is that right yeah and i think that depends on your you know your thoughts on what the best solution for the problem that we're having is which you know we're not really here to address today but the way it's been handled for this specific project where lecturing is inappropriate. Follow it, Mr. Chair.
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
1:18:07
But isn't that exactly what we're here today is to solve this problem? I mean, at the end of your presentation, you made a
statement. One of y'all made a statement, something to the effect of like this supposed crisis. I mean, are we not in a crisis when it comes to our prisons in this
Speaker 157
1:18:20
state? I served on a quorum court before I came to the legislature and we couldn't put people in our county jail for misdemeanors because it was full of state inmates. We now have state inmates that are getting released under EPA. I mean, these are, I'm sorry, but they really are violent criminals. In fact, to get ready for today's hearing, I went and looked at the EPA reports for 2022 when they last had to do a round of releases, and I picked a name at random. I just literally picked a name at random out of the list, and it was a guy that had been
arrested and sentenced to 20 years for raping a 15-year-old, and he was out in like three and a half years under EPA. I think we do have a crisis, and we've got to do something about him. Is that not the purpose that we're here today? Whether it's building
Speaker 48
1:19:01
a new prison here, there, or somewhere else, we've got to have space for these people. I think the purpose of this committee is to address the complaint that we filed and the crisis the Decades of underfunding that's led to the crisis all of the situations surrounding that Aren't really at play today. What's at play today is the improper way the state has gone about this specific capital improvement
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
1:19:27
Senator Disman you're recognized. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Okay to that in because I've been
a little bit curious myself I mean and it may be specifically directed towards you or the other chairman or whoever about what is what are we looking at for an outcome today I mean is there some action that you think that we're going to be taking or but because they clearly believe there should be an action taken that was what was just stated what is the
perception of the leadership of the committee i will give you uh my perception as the chair of jpr and and my co-chair
and i both agreed to have the meeting one was uh we we don't have meetings for every citizen request not every citizen's request has this many people involved not every citizen request has had this much media not ever citizen request uh it probably has had as much factual information and it may cut both ways i'm trying to do the responsibility to chair as far the outcome
uh my my reason for having this committee is for transparency that's been stated and i hope that is also felt the same way from the state's point of view because i'm again they have their own packet and they'll be able to speak too but is to give an air of transparency and an air that this thing can be covered in a fair way as far as whether it'll change anything i don't have a predetermined mindset i'll let my co-chair speak if he'd like to
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
1:21:17
Senator Dismayne, I agree wholly with what Senator Rice said. I know we have to eventually sometimes let our citizen groups, when it's such a large item and such a big request, to come and present. What comes out of this meeting is up to the group that sits behind them over here. You know, if we want to carry this any further, that would go through here. Or if they want to carry it any further, they'll go to where they have to. But I think we're hearing it, let you guys hear it, make your decisions if you want to do anything about it or not.
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
1:21:50
That would be mine. So, I mean, just to be clear, I'm great with the transparency and great with the discussion. I mean, is there expectation that there's going to be some kind of vote for some type of action, or you're both saying that that is to be determined? Because I'm just trying to understand what my role is as a committee member for what it is we're doing aside from listening which i am very happy to do i mean if somebody
some of the committee wants to make a motion to vote on something's fine what my goal is here today is is take this and determine if there's more information needing again it's been stated and i think the other side finally came to maybe the term of investigation is not the same as it is for some terms of investigation. We have our limitations, but there are things within state government we can check on. If we feel like there's something needs to be done, we can do that. If not, we'll determine by taking in the information today
and decide if we want to discuss any more. Hope that answers your question. I do not see anyone else on the board for these. If not, thank you for your presentation, and we'll move on with the agenda. Thank you. Next up, we have Joe Perfury, Senior Advisor, Office of the
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
1:23:17
Government of Arkansas. Is Mr. Perfury here?
And I will clarify with staff, like I asked earlier, did you ever
hear anything? okay i'm going to go next we may come back to that next i'll go to ann laidlaw
director uh division of building authority department of shared administration services this
laidlaw will come up. Also, we have Shelby Johnson, Director of Division of Geographic Information Systems
in SAS. Welcome. If you'll turn your microphones on, and I'll give you the oath. If you'll stand raise your right hand
do you solemnly swear go ahead and state your name first please and lay ball shelby johnson do
Speaker 38
1:24:31
you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you're about to give will be the truth over truth nothing but the truth i do thank you
appreciate y'all being here and i will open it up you've heard the citizens complaint I'll let you go wherever you need to and then we'll open up for questions Happy to answer your question sir Mr. Johnson you the same Yes sir Alright members questions for Mr. Laidlaw
or Mr. Johnson got center ricky hill over
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
1:25:12
here i guess i'd just like a response from you for
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
1:25:17
the information that they provided where they used your name on it a while ago well there were from the emails all
the way through i want to hear your opinion on what you think about the information that they that they provided were they accurate were they not just kind of over overall aspect we're giving you chance or I'm asking you to rebuke or agree with what they said. Thank you for the opportunity yes
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:25:44
sir. Obviously there were a lot of written communications a lot of
other conversations that we had so I think what you've seen are excerpts from a lot of that you're not seeing the full explanation or comments in many cases and I think that's something we have to keep in mind is that information's been pulled out that they wanted to share other information was available that was not shared certainly the statement about my visiting the site i did jump out ahead on the fourth of july weekend and told my husband let's go take a road trip i want to go to franklin county
and he goes well i don't understand and i said well we're going to go and i made that trip to franklin county i did come in through highway 96 which as the video shows and many of the that you all are familiar is not the best highway so my comments that i returned with on that following monday where i have concerns about the access to the property so the team the rest of the team went out and they looked at it but they came in a different way a different highway which was far better that does carry better traffic and also went into the fort smith area which is the main
artery that will provide workforce for the site so my assessment was a quick one i did on my own not taking in consideration all the roadways and arteries that are available to the site And so I made a statement, but they were able to come back and show me that there were many other ways to access the property, which I agreed. I did not do a thorough site visit the first time I went out. Our team worked very closely with geographic information and the wonderful resources and the knowledge that they have to go in and to access the data they have access to that my office does not.
We also did extensive communications and conversations with other state officials, other state offices that are tremendous resources for our state to do further research on the site. So, yes, we did do extensive work. My notebook is proof that there was a lot of work that was done, but I did not do that on my own. We had tremendous help from GIS and other state resources. So you saw written communications,
but I think you only have seen a portion of communications that really don't tell the full story or information that it's important for
what we've done here, the work we've done here. Okay, before I go to Representative Eulanks,
let me ask you this. Where do you live? Where do I live currently? Where do you live, yes. I
Speaker 201
1:28:29
live in North Liderot. Okay. Do you travel the state extensively?
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:28:35
I have traveled it quite a bit over the years. My family lives in Crittenden County, and I travel about three times a month. I travel to take care of my parents. And I will agree
Speaker 185
1:28:47
with your statement that things can be taken to present one
side, can be factual, present one side stronger than maybe the whole thing also you're not from that area no sir i'm
not from you don't travel that area regularly i do not you don't know
those people you don't know the jobs you can look at a piece of paper like i do and i don't know the whole story i do not just so that that's from a
common sense mindset mine's very common yes very simple but we don't know each other's backgrounds and we don't always know the whole story and i think some of that on both sides yes sir is what we're dealing with today
with that i appreciate that i'm going to ribs
Speaker 210
1:29:49
interview banks mr mr chair go ahead thank
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
1:29:53
you mr chair uh I guess it's been almost a year ago when we were first notified that the governor was going to make an announcement on a Thursday that we were building a prison in Franklin County. Senator Stubblefield and I were notified that Tuesday that that press conference was going to take place.
I believe both of you were in the meeting that I asked for that Thursday morning because Charleston was going to be having a town hall meeting that night, And we met in the conference room behind us where I asked, and I think just about everybody that was involved in the site selection or the main folks were there. And I wanted to know what the criteria was for this site selection. You know, the first thing that I was told was that it would be within so many miles of an interstate.
And I remember commenting. I said, well, you missed that one right off the bat. And then you went through a lot of the things that have been mentioned as far as workforce and infrastructure, as far as roads and everything. But I remember asking specifically, have you talked to Fort Smith or Ozark with regard to water availability? And my recollection was that I was told yes. Now, I saw something that was presented earlier in that letter where Ozark had,
I think the Department of Health had contacted Ozark, and they had 3 million gallons excess. But I don't know if the right questions were asked of them. I mean, is that raw water? Is that filtered water? You know, the problem is you may have a lot of raw water, but if you don't have the filtering capacity, it's not going to do you any good. Given the news articles that have come out in the last few weeks regarding Fort Smith's issues that they have currently with their water system
and that Ozark is either unable or unwilling to sell water for this project, it really does make me question whether, you know, the proper process was gone through in order to determine whether you have the infrastructure needed in order to have a 3,000-bed prison there. And just given that fact, you know, it doesn't foster a great deal of confidence that the other calculations that were made with regard to workforce and everything are accurate as well.
I attended the Charleston Town Hall. Of course, I wasn't asked any questions other than when I was notified. Later, there was a town hall in Cecil that I attended. And later that week, I was asked to come out and ride over the property on a side-by-side, which I did with some people that live very close proximity to the property, and that was before it was posted.
So, as far as I know, I didn't break any laws, but, you know, I saw the lay of the land, but I'm not an engineer, I'm not a builder, I'm not an architect. So, you know, we can do a lot of things, you know, with building, but I also know that it looked like there was a lot of solid rock up there, and I know that's going to impact building costs and everything. I guess my frustration is I don't know that I have a lot of confidence in the process.
This legislature has hired consultants in the past dealing with a whole host of issues, whether it was procurement or health care or insurance or whatever. It seems like we sort of did that, but we didn't allow them to do their job, and I don't even know if that's an accurate statement. But I don't think we should expect our state employees necessarily to have the expertise to make these decisions.
So I'm not trying to put the blame on you, but I know you were probably trying to find a location that might fit. And it looks like we just tried to make this fit. And if half of the stuff that has been presented by the group from Charleston is accurate, I don't think we did. I don't know that I have a question for you other than that there seems to be an unwillingness to even consider another site at this point.
And I don't understand that either. I mean, I've been in business for myself just about my whole adult life. And as you get more information and more facts, you've got to be flexible enough to make different decisions. And so are you still convinced that you think this is the
Chair
Unverified
1:35:01
best site for this prison? Yes, sir, I am, especially after reading the consultant's report
Speaker 216
1:35:07
from McClellan, McClellan Consulting Engineers.
Their report goes through the cultural features, threatening to danger species, wetlands inventory, the geotechnical studies. And that report affirms that our work was sound. And that may be debatable, but our site selection was sound based on the report that came back from them. And so I do, I'm very proud of our work. Follow up, Mr. Chair.
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
1:35:40
Go ahead. Well, I think one of the things that has been brought out was the need for community buy-in. And it, I mean, it's apparent that that didn't take place. I mean, it was mentioned a couple of times. I think Mr. Perfieri had actually, based off what I viewed on the screen, actually said that that was a key ingredient. Senator Stubblefield and I represent that area and we didn't have a clue that they was even being considered until the Tuesday before the announcement.
Speaker 216
1:36:12
Yes, sir. That would be a policy lane that would be not my lane and I don't believe it would
be Ann's lane either. That's correct. Senator Payton,
Senator John Payton
Unverified
1:36:32
you're recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chair. So prior to the contract date where the state was
obligated to purchase the property, what were your department's tasked with?
Prior to the commitment date, Director Laidlaw, what specifically had your department been
tasked with doing in the way of due diligence? Correct. Obviously, we had to
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:36:58
get it under contract before we even have access to the property. So a lot of preliminary work was done through
GIS and their mapping and resources and data that they had to see if where it fell within the criteria that we were working with. But once we contacted the broker, we were able to access the site, do some additional work,
but we had to actually put the site under contract before we got an appraisal or before we could order a survey.
Senator John Payton
Unverified
1:37:29
So prior to contract, was your department ask for a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down on this property? We were still assessing it, of
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:37:35
course. We had to do our due diligence before we could do that. Well, I'm saying before. The
initial criteria, yes, sir. We did do that, and we did see that it was meeting the criteria, so we needed to dive deeper. We put it under contract, which, yes, sir, there is an exit once we went under contract.
That's what the due diligence period is for,
of course. When did that expire? The contract was going to expire late October, and so we were given 90 days to do our due diligence. And so we did work as quickly as we could during that period of time. That's where we were accessing a number of state resources. GIS was on the property numerous
times, doing evaluations and surveys and using their drones to get more information, as much information as we could. But that was
Senator John Payton
Unverified
1:38:23
our deep dive period. So somewhere within that 90 days, both your departments gave a thumbs up as this property being suitable.
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:38:30
By the time we got to the end of that period, we were able to check off those items on the list
that we were asked to accomplish. Yes, sir, for
the site assessment. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And just for clarification, might help somebody. On the two things, I can't remember, I believe it was mid-July, where you made a statement, not viable. was that within that 90-day period that was before that that was before
the 90 days okay i want to clarify that yes sir thank
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:38:56
you representative wooten you're recognized thank you mr chairman i
have one question if i may of the chairman before we start will will the governor's office respond to their personnel not being here uh we'll bring that up when we get through these two all right Thank you.
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:39:22
have more? That's it. Thank you. I want to make a statement before I start questioning. Having been in law enforcement several years ago, I am for a prison.
We need one. But the location that we picked is the wrong one. I want you to answer this question. Did you look at the water? Did you drill? I will
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:39:52
let Mr. Johnson answer the question because there was a lot of looking at the water, yes,
Chair
Unverified
1:39:58
sir. He did look at it? Yes, sir. We evaluated that
Speaker 216
1:40:02
with our partners over at the Arkansas Department of Health. It's the engineering section that they have a regulatory role on water.
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:40:10
Did you consider the drillers that drilled out there? No, sir. That happened later. Okay, so that's not been considered. The floor rate of the need of a half a million gallons has not been addressed by anyone in state government. Is that
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
1:40:31
correct? Do you mean the load for tank? I'm talking about the water availability. Supply. Supply. Yes, sir. Let me see if I
Speaker 248
1:40:39
can pull up that information for you.
Speaker 216
1:40:46
so i'll just read you the salient parts this is from craig quarter he is at the arkansas department of health he's one of the engineers that works on the water there and his that's
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:41:03
not my question my question is did you did you look at the drilling report developed by the two drillers that drilled out there on that site no sir that
Speaker 216
1:41:12
happened after our work was completed. What do you mean
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:41:15
it happened afterwards? It happened after we
Speaker 216
1:41:20
completed our site selection recommendation. So you
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:41:23
approved the site not knowing what the flow rate was of 2.6 tenths gallons per day? No, sir. It wasn't
Speaker 252
1:41:30
my role to approve the site. We were making a recommendation for the
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:41:36
site. Somebody needs to kick the chair back and tell the governor how it is and it's going to have to be some of the staff that's going to do it for one
I'm furious about the fact that Mr. Porphy whatever his name is from Arizona didn't get here didn't be here committee members that's a slap at every one of you that the governor's office is not here and i am not for violent criminals going up and down the street now one more question and let me just go through the whole list you didn't check the water flow when the drillers the fire wasn't
looked at the electrical supply wasn't looked at the soil was not tested did y'all test the soil No, sir, we didn't test the soil. You did not test the soil. Do you know that they drilled down 190 feet and they hit rock all the way down except for the last 8 or 10 feet? Yes, sir. And I know the chairman said if they had to go 1,000 feet, they would, but how much is that going to cost us?
But you all didn't do any of
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:42:58
that. We did some preliminary work. We knew the makeup of the soil. We did consult with a soil
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:43:04
expert. Okay, what about the workforce? Did you look at the availability of
Chair
Unverified
1:43:08
the workforce? Yes, sir. Representative Wooten, if you would allow me, I'd like to read you something from the Department of Health, and then I can
Speaker 216
1:43:16
show you an illustration. It's back on your question regarding water. All right. The capacity of the four-inch line which stops at the property may not be adequate to supply your proposed facility.
While a hydraulic analysis would be needed, an 8-inch main from the intersection I-217 and Highway 215 extending north along Highway 215 to the entrance to your site will potentially provide adequate water to your site. And then I have this exhibit here if you'd like to see a copy of it, which is the water pipelines that the Department of Health has for that area. The red dot in this exhibit is the site, and just south of that site is an 8-inch water line that comes up to the tower that's on Ridge Road.
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:44:03
But that's not answering the
question. That 8-inch line is there, provided that the water is available. The water is not available up there. The city of Ozark, the city of Fort Smith, the city of Charleston, Paris, and the rest of them, they cannot supply the water of 360,000, I've heard, or 500,000. Is that a true statement?
I don't know. You don't know? And yet you're the geologist for the state? No, sir. Geographic Information Systems. Okay, let me ask you, Madam Director,
how many trips did you make up there? Two.
Speaker 192
1:44:57
Two. To Franklin County? Yes. I think I made a total of
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:45:05
three. To the site? Three. How many? I made numerous trips around the state as we were searching for property.
Yes, sir. I was involved directly on traveling, looking for sites, but I made three trips to Franklin County. i
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
1:45:19
have no further questions at this point thank you senator hickey you're recognized yes thank you mr chair
Senator Jimmy Hickey, Jr
Unverified
1:45:25
of course i'm one of the members that did not vote for the appropriation but i also want to say that my dealings with both of you all have always been uh great with state government but i'm gonna ask you a pointed question then i want to go back to the water
if that's okay so and i think senator payton may have been hitting on my question but i want to ask it a little more correct were either of you ever asked to make this site work this site work by any legislator or executive branch uh any employee or any other political figure and again that'd be all inclusive i just want to know did someone say we want to make this work and tell you all to do that some way no sir no sir okay so back to this water line so you are
You all are the ones that I need to ask
Speaker 248
1:46:21
the questions about this? We do not fulfill the regulatory role over drinking water in Arkansas. However, our colleagues at the Department of
Senator Jimmy Hickey, Jr
Unverified
1:46:28
Health do. Okay. Well, I don't know if they're here. I'm more, as with Representative Wooten about this availability, this whole utility deal has been my concern from the beginning. Matter of fact, you know, I even tried to run some legislation to try to get more money because I thought, well, we cannot do this without this availability.
and it just wasn't hard to see that it was not there. Now, all of this also come out during the session that, you know, Fort Smith was not going to be able to supply the water, and Ozan didn't have the capacity or the filtering capabilities or this and that, and we were getting all that information. So we did the site selection, and you're telling me that there was an 8-inch water line, which is basically all we did. We just seen that there was an 8-inch water line that was within so many miles or whatever of the property?
Speaker 216
1:47:21
That's the nearest large line that comes in from the south. There's a four-inch line that's in front of the property, and so we knew that the River South water system had water pipelines
Chair
Unverified
1:47:34
in that area, and we knew all along that all of that infrastructure would likely require upgrades. Okay, but
Senator Jimmy Hickey, Jr
Unverified
1:47:40
with what we've heard now, we understand that it would it might require upgrades and it might be cost effective to do that i've struggled with i've struggled with this from day one that you know you don't find a piece
of property that's uh located within the utilities of the water and the sewer because you know it's on a percentage basis and i'm not saying to pay above market value but i'd rather go out and pay 500 600 700 000 more for a piece of property that's got those utilities that are not only available but that are able to supply it so i'm hearing this thing about this eight inch water line but obviously with what's come out this isn't going to work without throwing you know i heard
you say earlier about it has the potential to carry it well the potential is going to cost how much more now because i've heard upwards to 200 million 250 million to try to get to try to get that type of wine with that capability to either come from fort smith or to do something different what have you all found that it's going to cost now to get that potential eight inch water line where it needs to be to be able to service this 3 000 bed prison and i'm going to stick with the
3,000 because that's what we've been told from the get-go Senator Vicki, we
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:49:08
knew that we were not going to find a site that had all the infrastructure there on the site. We knew
we were going to have to do upgrades and extensions. So that was not we didn't go out with the expectation of all being there. I mean this is the size of another community. So we just needed access to those utilities. We knew there would be cost associated with bringing that infrastructure onto the site to accommodate the prison. The cost associated with the water, we are not the ones that are
working on that right now. We have another department or two that are actually looking into that to see what options may be available to be able to do that. But we didn't expect to drill to find enough water on the site, but we did know there was going to be access to water through the information we were able to get from the Department of Health. And the same for the electricity water treatment plants are something that are typically have to be done with correctional facilities data communications a lot of other utilities were also looked at of course and we
were able to be assured that access was
Senator Jimmy Hickey, Jr
Unverified
1:50:13
there i understand and if i can can i continue mr chair so
i understand what you're saying but with where with where you were then you were you had to you had to assign a cost or somebody had to assign a cost a contingency that says the upgrades available we think that you know that we can get that done within six million dollars or seven million dollars whatever it may have been i'm making something up what is that upgrade going
to cost to be able to deliver that water all the way to the location to be sufficient and i want to know are we talking about does that is that all inclusive of fire hydrants along the way is that other calculating other residents wanting to be able to tap on to it are we going to be are we going to put those boots and saddles on while the grounds open are we going to have those residents to do it later what where are we at because i keep hearing all this stuff and i heard
one of our members ask the questions what are we doing here today i'm not a member of this committee i'll tell you what i'm doing here today i'm trying to figure out a way to vote for the appropriation and all i do is get further and further and further away and it's not that i want to be hard i don't think that unlike a lot of people right now that we've made a boondoggle i don't think that it is a train wreck i think that we've merely made a misstep and somebody needs to say we've made a misstep unless you can provide me the information today that says that what that
water is going to cost to get there and then i can talk about the sewer treatment how much more is it going to cost to get where you
can turn on a spigot a faucet at that location with filtered municipal water yes yes sir i wish i could
Chair
Unverified
1:52:09
answer your question i don't have that answer today those are studies that are still uh yet to come thank you mr johnson yes sir representative mckenzie you're recognized
Representative Brit McKenzie
Unverified
1:52:22
thank you mr chair um appreciate the latitude for non-members
to ask questions so senator hickey asked a question i think
it's important um it was it was a direct question but for those that are watching this in the audience or they're tuning in i want to make sure we're abundantly clear has anyone asked you to retrofit or to make this site selection work for a political or non-political reason be the site that we ultimately recommend back to the executive branch of the government? No sir. No sir. Under no duress extent of that, okay. No duress. Since
this announcement of the site location, has there been any members of the legislature, members of the government come to you and ask for the possibility of looking at a different site location? If so, has there been any work or preliminary work done to investigate those sites and to see if they're cost-effective or possible? Not
Speaker 283
1:53:17
subsequently, no, but we did quite a
Speaker 216
1:53:20
bit of work on alternative sites, other sites that we had in the portfolio before we landed on this site.
Representative Brit McKenzie
Unverified
1:53:27
There was a lot of work done there. Can you just explain some of those additional sites? I
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:53:33
mean, you don't have to go, you know, parcel 125 in Benton County. what top tier five different sites that we were working on that we had through i mean we went through like over 25 000 sites down to 6 000 sites down to those that we actually were able to physically go look at and that's where we ended up with our top tier of sites which we did eventually and someone made the comment that that this franklin county wasn't included in the counties well it was actually the river valley was and so it stretched from conway all the way to
sebastian county so it clearly was within the area that we had identified as ideal for for the prison for the correctional facility so we did identify a number of sites we just weren't able to get any other sites under contract up to the point that we had done our due diligence had moved into due diligence on the
franklin county site but it was those had were checking the boxes also but you have to have a willing seller and
we just were not able to get to a willing seller situation
Speaker 287
1:54:30
And Representative McKenzie, if I may, one of the key points
Speaker 216
1:54:34
that is kind of in the fine print of our work,
but it's very important to understand, is it's not like just going up to your favorite buffet and ordering off the menu that you can find a site like this. The second thing that's important is that we also were looking at commercial properties that were listed for sale in our early work. We mapped about 50 properties that were around the state that were listed on the multi-list that were at least 250 acres or bigger in size.
Speaker 224
1:55:12
And those, what we were looking at, we were finding what I
Speaker 216
1:55:19
would traditionally call hunting property. And so I think that, and I want to say, let me just pause for a second, and provide thanks for the critique by the citizens from Francombe County. They have for sure sharpened their pencils, and they critiqued our work, and I think that that is a very democratic process for this committee
to be able to allow them to provide that to you today. But where I was headed was that one of the things that they articulated in their presentation was the difference between urban rural and so when I think about urban rural I think about not highway 215 which is where this site is at sure that site is a rural site but to me rural is dirt road and where we were finding these commercial properties that were
traditionally hunting style what i would characterize as great place for deer hunting those those were the larger tracks that you would see come up for sale they would be in upland areas very steep usually have hollers and creeks in them and they were accessible only by dirt roads so that dirt road accessibility automatically you know you look at those 50 properties and we were automatically taking you know a big chunk of those right off the list because they were
Representative Brit McKenzie
Unverified
1:56:45
on a dirt road. Just as a quick follow-up, Chair. So the conversations revolving around suitability.
I would love for a prison site to be like an RV camp where we plug in and ready to go. We know that's not the case. This is a significant piece of infrastructure. I'd love to, to your point about the folks who, the citizens' complaints, I think they did a great job of outlining certain elements. The suitability of this site compared to the, You said $25,000 down to $6,000, down to $10,000, down to whatever other number. Can we talk about the financial or fiscal checks that you did and how much more or less were those other sites in comparison to the Franklin County site?
Not without its hang-ups, so I think we all can understand and appreciate that. And then just anecdotally, because you led this recommendation process, tell us about some of those hang-ups that made those sites unsuitable, not suitable, or the costs that were associated that would put them in a completely not buildable category. Correct. I want to take a stab first, if you
Speaker 224
1:57:46
don't mind, Ann. Okay, go ahead. When we looked at those top-tier sites, we were finding things that were like every site had a pro and a con,
and some of them we found, you know, right on the interstate. We found other sites that had expansive flat space, but it was on the other side of a railroad track, which means you're looking at an $8 million overpass construction to bring
Speaker 216
1:58:10
traffic to that site. So every site that we were looking at had pros and cons. One of our sites had a stream that ran through it. It probably precluded it from being able to be a great site because of that stream. Another site had a cemetery on it.
And so as we were looking at all these sites, they all had some really glamorous things about them. There was one site that was north of Alma, had a three-million-gallon water tank
Speaker 224
1:58:36
sitting right on it. But the owners would never come to the table.
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
1:58:43
And we did have one of our top-tier sites that we were really excited about, and it got sold right out from Unders. And then the new owner had said, well, we'll talk to you, and the price on that property just exponentially was so much higher.
And then there were some other conditions associated that it was just no longer viable for the state. So, and that was one of the things about this site when it, when we located it, it had, and I will mention that we had identified it in the big scale of when there were a lot of properties, but that property actually went under contract. This Franklin County property went under contract. So it wasn't on our radar at all. They had an experience with, I think, a solar company that tied it up for a while. And so when the property came back on the market, they were not interested in getting,
you know, drawn out in a long due diligence period. So our contract period was only 90 days. But when we circled back and were able to and had access to it, we did get kind of excited because it was checking a lot of those boxes that we'd been looking for, and we had a seller that was very willing to work with us, give us access, allow us to start doing a lot of that preliminary work that we needed to do. So, yeah, the price that we were able to get this property under appraised value, which thrilled us, In addition to that, it was a much lower price per acre than we'd expected to be able to get,
and certainly less than the few other sites that we were actually able to get that were listed based on the listing price for
those properties. So there was a number of very positives in that respect for the property. One more, Mr. Chair, if that's possible.
Representative Brit McKenzie
Unverified
2:00:17
Wrap it up. Yes, sir. I'm going to have to tighten up one more time. Thank you again, Mr. Chair. It's fair criticism for the citizen complainants on the criterion, And I will agree that I think I can attest for, like, Senator Hickey in the banking world or Senator Bryan in the construction world or me in professional services, scope creep kills projects.
Criterion is, you know, the mission objective, how we align in the tool of accountability from the beginning. To that end, I also think that it's okay to evolve the criterion to make a site suitable as long as we're, you know, dealing in apples and oranges and not apples and bowling balls. Can you help me understand how that criterion changed over time, and is that still appropriate criterion to this day? If you could redo it, where we ended up, we're in
Speaker 216
2:01:05
the right place for us to be shovel-ready to build a prison. I think one of the things that was possibly misunderstood is that while we were looking at the commercially listed real estate that was listed for sale,
We were also trying to figure out where could we find sites that would be potentially suitable. And when we did our analytic, we built a very large model using the county assessor records from the various assessors across the state. It's 1.8 million plus records. And so we needed a way to narrow that down. We started by selecting large tracks, and then we looked for large track single owner. And then we had, as Ann pointed out earlier, we had over 25,000 candidates.
And there's no way that an individual could look through 25,000 candidates. So we made an assumption that if we looked for tracks that were situated within a couple of miles of U.S. or interstate highway, that would help narrow our field. We did that, go from 25,000 down to 6,000 candidates. And that's where we were at in the 6,000 candidates. we started to focus our efforts on the upper end of the Arkansas River Valley and looking at those sites that were in that two-mile window around the interstates.
But that didn't preclude that we weren't looking at other candidates that were on other state highways. And so that's an example where the Franklin County folks, you know, maybe misunderstood that a little bit. That interstate access, while it would have been great, it was not a hard rule requirement for the department of corrections that was a guideline that we built in to our model to help narrow down the field if that makes sense okay and i appreciate
that i'm going to tie it up a little bit on my time i got board loaded up some draft office come
back some come back on let me just mention real quick something i struggle with during session when we were voting yeah you spent i say you the state spent three million dollars on a piece of land presented in a presentation everybody knows they've been offered their money back what i have said you can you could pay 20 million dollars for another piece of land that had more
infrastructure from somebody that might not talk to you about that lowball figure that you're wanting to buy that we all want a bargain and through me it's still a lot but you could spend more money and in the scope of what's going to be spent on a project it still be affordable so i don't i'm not asking for a deal i just want to throw that out that was mine i tried to present that during the session i never got anybody admit that's true but i still think it was i'm going to go to senator king and if you all will keep it to one two questions we'll
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
2:03:59
Get back in the queue. Senator King. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You know, I've been around a while. I've been through forestry scandal, Bill Walker scandals, University Arkansas scandals. I understand the people in the middle. And by Mr. Perfieri not showing up, that's where the real questions are going and who really should be grilled. I understand you work for the governor and you do everything. I've been around a while. But my question is to you, in this whole discussion, I've
talked about these mega prisons, as somebody's worked on it since 2017 and addressing this budget-wise. everything to take care of this is you look at utah alabama all these mega prisons are mega
disasters every one of them have been they go into promise and everything was there any discussion about looking at previous mega prisons that were built in utah alabama was there any discussion do you remember about looking in those things about what happened yes
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:04:51
sir i think we we did do that um in fact that is why we did decide
to bring on an owner's rep so we could get the expertise, working directly with the team. The owner's rep was not being hired to do our site selection for us. They were going to help with site assessment, but we went out looking for a site.
But we wanted to bring that owner's rep on that had direct experience with a correctional facility construction so that we could avoid those pitfalls and mistakes that others had made, that we could learn, take, I mean, the designs are there. We don't have to go out and reinvent the wheel. We knew there were plenty of very well-designed facilities that we could work with. And so that's why we had identified the acreage that we needed, that we felt would accommodate the number of beds that were needed. And we were going to work with a cookie cutter.
So we were learning from those mistakes, learning from those designs that had been developed. And so we had a pretty good understanding of how we could start that process. And the owner's rep was brought on to help
Speaker 92
2:05:49
us to facilitate that, carry us through that process as efficiently as we could okay like i said i understand who you
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
2:05:55
work for and what you got to do and the message you got to present and mr profiri and mr chairman i just like to say it looks like we've got a better chance of getting jeffrey epstein here to talk about child sex trafficking and they do mr profiri who's paid almost a quarter of a million
dollars a year salary and benefits and has been the central person i just saw him in the capital earlier today so
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
2:06:17
he's around we'll we'll address that here in a minute senator dismay you recognize and then send a representative Kavanaugh after that.
All right, thank you. And so just to make sure I understand, there wasn't another site you looked at it. As soon as they found out you were looking to, you know, purchase for the prison, the price
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:06:34
went up. There was one particular site that, yes, sir, that did happen. Others we weren't even able to get the owners to agree to even negotiate with us
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
2:06:41
to put them under contract. So the shocker is that once it becomes public that you're looking to buy a particular piece of property, probably the details of that transaction change and not in the favor of the buyer that's correct one question I have is because I think I've seen it but it's been a little while because we're removed from session now at this point but there was an allocation for wastewater and water uh as far and I think that may have come in not like I said as far as the assessment of the site do you recall what those dollar numbers were for what it would take to get water what we kind of budgeted
for and again I know that I may be on the wrong group because you were looking at the purchase
Speaker 289
2:07:22
side not the assessment after the fact I'm not aware
Speaker 228
2:07:28
of those numbers senator okay sorry all
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
2:07:30
right thank you represent Kevin all you recognize thank you mr. chairman over here one of the criteria for the site was community buy in and that's one in particular that is interest me more than some of the other things we're hearing can you tell us how you determined community buy-in for
Speaker 216
2:07:48
this site when it was selected that that that was not not in our lane our role was on the recommendations looking at uh other criteria and so that criteria was we were looking at the physical characteristics and that that social uh aspect was not something that we were directly involved in so i'm sorry i'm sorry i can't answer your question
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
2:08:14
who was to make that determination about so if we're going
to ask that question ultimately who was the person responsible for
determining and how they determined community buy-in the owner's
Speaker 316
2:08:26
representative was going to help with that process who said the
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:08:29
owner's representative that was under contract that was one of the roles that they were going to play was to to carry us through that process with the community but it was not something that our offices were going to be directly involved
Speaker 204
2:08:42
with okay and i don't want to sound rude
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
2:08:45
yes ma'am but it's not up to the owners to determine community buy-in for the state of arkansas someone within the state should have been making the determination
about what the community's feeling were for this because i know there are lots of communities that would have loved to have it because it's going to be an economic boom and i don't disagree with that but one of the the core contentions we have here with this site is community buy-in and are you trying to say there wasn't anybody in the state that was looking at community buy-in they were just looking at the physical location but they weren't really looking at community
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:09:24
buy-in representative our our responsibility did not include the community buy-in that was not like
like mr johnson said that was not a role that we were going to play but yes ma'am it was going to happen with the state there was that was another the next step that was coming but it was not in our in our uh list of responsibilities
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
2:09:43
okay whose responsibility was that the the owner's
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:09:46
representative that was hired was going to be working directly with department of corrections to carry it through that process so a department of corrections was
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
2:09:53
the one it was supposed to be fine that's what i'm trying to find out in the state the department of corrections are the one
that was supposed to be working on how to determine community
Speaker 216
2:10:07
buy-in yes ma'am okay thank you. Representative Kavanaugh, if I may, you raised a point that I think is worth diving into just briefly. You mentioned the other communities that did want to bring a location, and we looked at those. The Department of Corrections had put out an invitation to communities across the state in late 2022, and the records that we got from that were from Marshall and Searcy County. They
They had offered up 40 acres that was near the end of their runway at their airport. City of Fordyce had a 35-acre site that was right on the edge of town. And then both Hope and Prescott teamed together, and they had two viable sites from a physical aspect that were in Hempstead County. And when we looked at those, they were, you know, 20, 28 miles down the road from the DOC site that's in Texarkana. And then when we looked at the workforce figures that were for that particular location,
it was like a little over 30, 35, 36,000 workforce. And so while it is true to say that there were other communities that did want a location, they didn't, the sites just, they weren't viable. Okay, I'm going to try to
Speaker 138
2:11:24
get everybody on the board. go on priority to committee members represented uh for your you're recognized it's kind of a financial question if
Representative Chad Puryear
Unverified
2:11:34
you folks can't answer it hopefully someone from your department will so
just two quick ones how much total money has been spent on this project as of right now including land purchase and all that and then i'll follow that up with approximately how much money is it going to cost us for you to tell us how much this
Speaker 200
2:11:55
is going to cost us well we don't have the we don't have the funding for the project so we
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:12:01
know that the property purchase was done for I think around 2.9 million 2.75 and then with with these I think it was close to 2.9 million and that transaction
was done through Arkansas Development Finance Authority that's the only I guess expense that we've been associated with directly most of the other work we did without a budget and so we did it without actually expending dollars we did it through our state resources as far as being able to get a true estimate or getting the design completed to get an estimate um that will fall of course with the design team which are currently on hold right
Speaker 216
2:12:37
now i might now add that
for our work on the site selection it was the cost was our time and we were able to work that in with our other work um so while we maintained our existing workload on 9-1-1 and some of the other work that we do um it it fell toward the end of the calendar year around the holidays and our work with cities and counties uh slows down a lot during that holiday window that's like late december and so a lot of our work was done in that latter part of the year so for um as far
as the site selection cost our work it
Representative Chad Puryear
Unverified
2:13:14
was just our time sir okay i appreciate one quick follow up chair great so i appreciate that it covers several departments but i do think those if there's folks here and i don't know who's supposed to be here not here to answer that but if you are here i think those are two good questions that would be great
Chair
Unverified
2:13:32
to all this committee here so appreciate that thank you uh senator hill you
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
2:13:38
dropped off okay senator mark johnson you recognize thank
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:13:43
you mr chairman uh i have a quick question for the chair
and then another quick question for our witnesses mr. chairman uh there's been some complaints about mr. porphyry not being here uh he was invited and i assume that was by the co-chairs he was invited to
the co-chairs agreements and staff did that and did not hear back okay so the fact
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:14:07
that he is an employee of the governor and not an agency then he would he and she would certainly have the ability to not attend because of the separation of powers
issue am i reading that correctly as opposed to someone who is a be
subpoenaed and certainly i would allow you to make your own assumptions the thing about this this the the legislative body approved funding for him the first time that he took on that role and then after that that may have got wrapped into the governor's budget I think it is a slap at this body not to even answer us and say he cannot be here or whatever but we will take a possible motion on that when
these two witnesses get through thank you mr.
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:14:56
and I'll now address the question to to this late law and mr. Johnson one of you said something about a site that that was very good but the owner in effect was not interested in selling did we somehow or another lose the right of eminent domain that could be used in this because i'm i'm thinking yes it'd be nice if you had someone that really had a great parcel and wanted to sell it on the other hand the cost of the dirt is one of the nominal costs of wherever this is located when we're talking
about you know half a billion dollars for this and water and all the other infrastructure things was imminent domain off the table when you were doing this study the division of building authority doesn't
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:15:44
have the power of domain anywhere other than pulaski county can you say that one more time me are we only have that power within pulaski county we do
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:15:55
not have it statewide we meaning your agency but not the department of corrections or our state government.
Am I reading that correctly?
Speaker 216
2:16:04
I'm not aware of that capability, but I can speak from just our work. We were not looking at sites where you were going to go to that level because that gets you into the challenge of working through just compensation. And we kind of made the conscientious decision, at least for our part of the work in the modeling is there's got to be a site out there. Let's go find it.
Speaker 252
2:16:32
And then you wouldn't be in the position of exercising eminent domain. Well, and I think
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:16:38
it's clear that, you know, we have a few folks here that didn't want it to be in their backyard. And I can understand that. I mean, but it's going to have to go in someone's backyard if we're going to have a prison. And I'm thinking that maybe we looked at this a little bit inside out instead of outside in and i'm i'm i'm wondering uh i mean i just think it should be on the table
that if you find a site that otherwise works since uh again the the acreage and all that is is a nominal i mean it's not insignificant but comparatively speaking it's relatively insignificant cost of this all the infrastructure things are really what seems to be and so i just want to make sure that that wasn't ignored in the process. And, and, uh, Ms. Laylaw, the fact that your agency only has eminent domain in Pulaski County, I get that, but these are the kinds of
things that, you know, can be worked out. I mean, I've, I worked, uh, in an agency once where we exercise eminent domain. There wasn't any question whether we could take a property. Now you get a right of entry and judge would say, okay, we're going to have a trial and we're going to determine what the compensation is but there was never any question that the state could take it and i i hope that didn't uh uh cause a either a delay or or something improper not blaming y'all or anybody on that but but i'm just trying to so you so you may your agencies made a decision in effect to say
there's plenty of places out here that seem to want it and we think we can find one that might work without having to uh look at condemning property am i understanding your answer correctly correct we
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:18:24
did not consider condemning property okay all
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
2:18:26
right you answered it i disagree with the decision but i appreciate your candor thank you thank you mr
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
2:18:34
chairman okay uh members try to be as concise as we can uh for time uh going to committee member representative mary bentley and
and then going to Senator Rickey Hill
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
2:18:45
after that. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Cindy Crawford right here. I'm in Mary's chair.
Well, are you on the committee? Yes. Someone had my chair, so I had to sit in the chair. You are recognized. Thank you. For the first time, I'd like an answer you gave, that we're not going to take people's property. Thank you for that. I think we as a body need to realize that we are not here to take property away from people.
And that, Senator, is ridiculous. If we are going to take property away from people, we don't need to be here. And so I would ask you, do you agree? Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. you through thank you senator ricky hill
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
2:19:47
going back to what we've been looking at and talking about throughout this you mentioned that
uh y'all went through all the different properties and everything trying to find the right size close to where it is and everything how is it that a solar company a crypto mining company can come in and they designate the area where they want to be then they can go in and buy property in those areas where the infrastructure is already set up for them yes you have to pay a little bit more but it saves you in the long run because you don't have to why did we not look at something like that where you found what you wanted with the infrastructure there that's already said where
they've got the water they've got the sewer they've got everything they can accommodate it and just pay a little more for the land because someone will sell it to you in that area that will save you. It may cost you, instead of $3 million, it may have cost you $20 million, but you're going to spend a lot more than that on the infrastructure. Why can we not do like a public company and
Speaker 200
2:20:47
search that way? Are you referring to the site? We did find the site that actually was purchased. Is that the site you're referring to?
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
2:20:54
I'm just referring to overall. Why didn't you all go out and say, we need 2,000 acres of land, whatever you need, and go to an area where they have the power lines already running through there, your main substations, they've got the sewer and everything, and buy it that way instead of saying, hey, let's go build a city. Why didn't we look at doing it that way? Because your infrastructure, yes, it's going to cost you more up front. You know that going into it. But it's going to save you in the long run when you do your due diligence before you make an offer.
You know, hey, we can buy this property for X amount of money. Everything's here. It sounds to me like we didn't do our homework on the
Speaker 287
2:21:34
front end, and now we're trying to do it on the back end. It's
Speaker 355
2:21:38
a very fair question, Senator Hill, and that property that you just
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
2:21:44
described is in the city. Well, you didn't
Speaker 224
2:21:47
offer enough money for it then, because you would have got it bought if
Speaker 216
2:21:52
you would have tried to. No, I didn't mean specifically. What I meant was generically. What you're describing where all of the infrastructure is already there is going to be more than likely inside a municipal boundary because the municipality has taken on that challenge of bringing sewer to that location for municipal purposes, the water's there for municipal purposes, those kinds of infrastructure.
that would normally be all of those things that we would all have desired for the perfect site would almost always be inside one of our municipalities okay let's take a farming area i know this i'm
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
2:22:26
just going to throw a town out england arkansas you've got workforce on little rock you've got water you you've got your infrastructure there i'm just throwing that one out there you know yes it is possible 26
Speaker 224
2:22:38
miles from dermont yeah or not dermont excuse me brightsville my bad i just used that town as
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
2:22:43
an example sure i just grabbed it out of the air
Speaker 359
2:22:47
we we ruled out a lot of a lot of arkansas was ruled out because of doc's criteria that said we want to be further away than 60 miles from i understand i understand that okay you may just like for another town
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
2:23:00
or another another name of a town that could work as far
as in west arkansas i just used england as an example yeah i could have used lone oak Yeah,
Speaker 216
2:23:14
the upper end of the River Valley was really the region that we centered on and focused in on.
If you think long range, 50 years out from now, that will be at the intersection of I-40 and I-49. It will be an area that is growing. Its population will continue to grow. and so those cities and towns that are on the upper end of the Arkansas River Valley would have been our high target areas that we're really looking for those sites. That would be like not in these cities but near these cities,
Alma, Van Buren, Fort Smith, Barling, Lavaca, Greenwood. I'm trying to think of all of them off the top of
Speaker 224
2:23:57
my head. Sorry, I can't remember all. We did look at a
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:24:01
number of sites there, And there were several of those that did hit our top tier. But getting to the point of being able to get a contract, we were not able. Would you please talk to the mic where I can hear you. We did have a number of those areas in our short list in our top tier. We were not able to get to a contract with those owners. In fact, one of them we found out actually had the future highway was going to be running right through it,
or interstate was going to be running right through it. So we were really close on the target on that one. But we have sites that were eliminated.
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
2:24:34
weren't able to get them under contract have you all estimated how much more it's going to
Chair
Unverified
2:24:44
you could have gotten that facility bought no
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
2:24:47
no sir thank you thank you going to representative uh long and then representative beady representative richmond and then representative lungstrom uh representative long you recognize thank you mr chairman and i
Representative Wayne Long
Unverified
2:25:00
thank you all for showing up um i've had a couple of questions one was there ever any consideration to doing like three different 1 000 bed prison sites since you know we basically wouldn't need nearly as much water in different areas like that that's actually a programming matter for the department
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:25:16
we were not that wasn't a part of our decisions that we were working with so no sir we did not personally do that we were we were looking for a site that would accommodate the correctional facility that we were asked to look for okay
Representative Wayne Long
Unverified
2:25:31
and next question what was the total
acres of this site in uh 825. uh it was lit
Speaker 224
2:25:40
it was originally listed for 825 but after uh after survey after land survey uh it pared down to 810. okay and uh you know they had
Representative Wayne Long
Unverified
2:25:48
a topo map up earlier but it didn't have any slopes listed any idea what the average slope is on this locks up i've never ever been to that area or even really seen any photos of
Speaker 259
2:25:59
it uh i i don't know the uh i don't remember the slope off of the
Speaker 216
2:26:04
top of my head uh it is uh it's south facing um and it i would
describe it as gentle to rolling um there are other people who would describe it as steep and i guess that's your perspective um but if you go to the site uh exhibit that was a part of the packet you can find the contour information in there and all up so there's a terrain model in there that allows you to see what the
Representative Wayne Long
Unverified
2:26:31
train looks like. On the USDA soil description I was looking at it and it looked like the Ender
series and the linker series was the only two that had suitable soils as
far as depth of rock to do like a subsurface septic system. Are y'all looking at strictly just doing off-site surface discharge type system I think from day one
Speaker 216
2:26:53
DOC has probably and I sure don't want to put words in their mouth but I think that their expectation was that they would be doing treatment on site building wastewater treatment on site and discharging into a creek I guess to
Speaker 218
2:27:08
be determined okay thank you appreciate it okay and members
just tell you where we're at we're coming up on 3 30. it was my goal to start winding down by 4 30 and get out of
here by 5. we've got a full board uh i've still got uh deals boc chairman minnie magnus and member lee watson to bring up please keep that in mind represent biddy to
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:27:34
recognize thank you mr chair uh director um johnson kind of a question uh in the presentation from from the group we heard some comments about workforce and the numbers that they used around 108 000 on the
workforce could you speak to the workforce and and your your study if you prepared those numbers could you give
Speaker 216
2:27:56
us some information on that yes sir workforce yeah and i i think that um that the the citizens accurately described uh when i spoke with the uh consultant that uh did that work for um like that consultants uh worked for a company that ended up locating here in little rock and
that facility was a large employer uh and it was an industrial manufacturing uh facility and uh rightly they the citizens determined that i did not understand their math and that's because i read the way they presented it literally uh after studying that and looking at how you might
Speaker 224
2:28:39
want to segment the workforce we made a raw assumption and it was a very simplistic assumption and what drives workforce more than anything especially in Arkansas is
Speaker 216
2:28:53
willingness to commute and we know
the reason we know that is because of our other mapping work that we do from time to time and I'm want to give you a really good example. When we had the solar eclipse, we mapped our state's workforce, state employees and where they're at and where they're willing, how far they're willing to drive. And we mapped our own workforce because we thought a lot of our workforce is going to want to see this event. And what we found is that a large part of our workforce lives quite far away
from work we narrowed in on about a 30 mile drive distance what we call a drive shed and what we did was we calculated that 30 mile drive shed from the various sites that we looked at and then we overlaid the U.S. census blocks that were inside that 30 mile driving distance and then we just counted up the total population in that drive shed and then the population age 18 plus in that drive shed and so that then allowed us once we had that model model built we could we could plug
coordinates in for any site and run that model really fast and be able to evaluate any other sites and so I I have a bunch of
Speaker 359
2:30:08
those exhibits that that I could I could show you we're going we're going to need to shorten our
Speaker 374
2:30:19
that covered well I would have liked to heard
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:30:23
a little more but I think basically that that addresses the question you did work look at workforce and that workforce study would reach out to the Fort Smith area
as far as a commute back and forth to the proposed site yes sir at that particular
Speaker 216
2:30:37
location we we found out that it would even reach a little bit into Oklahoma oh thank you
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
2:30:44
and then the the final question we also heard some remarks made as far as fire protection in that area can any either of you speak uh to the fire protection that could be provided for that site one of the
Speaker 216
2:30:58
things that we learned in our visits with our colleagues at dlc is that it's very regular for them to build their
own fire capabilities on campus within the campus and so fire was fire is a concern certainly we don't have robust public safety we also learned that as you would expect sometimes accidents happen during discussion or construction and so you would want some capability there at least somewhere nearby in the event of a construction accident.
And so that's kind of why we were looking at that twofold, help with fire suppression for wildland fire. And then on campus, you would have that contained, and then you would have just the run-of-the-mill emergency response with volunteer-first responders, which would come from those neighboring nearby departments. All right.
Representative Mark Perry
Unverified
2:31:57
Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Represent Richardson you dropped off Thank you,
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
2:32:05
mr. Chair real my question is this the email said that you found it not viable was that?
One of you guys who that was me. Okay. What changed if you thought it was not viable 90 days before you did that What changed your mind to
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:32:21
say that it is it was my drive to the property using highway 96 Say that one more time. It was my drive to the property where I used Highway 96 to access the property. And when a team more experienced than I went back out and looked at it, they used Highway, I guess, 22. And that's where we determined that most of the workforce would be using 22 out of both Sebastian County and beyond.
Speaker 382
2:32:45
Pull your microphone up closer to you and my people
Speaker 204
2:32:50
over here. Okay, sorry. It was I chose Highway 96 instead of Highway 22 to
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
2:32:55
access the property. And it was also stated that I think Senator King said that the road had grass come up and I got to redo the road.
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:33:03
Is that inaccurate? That was Highway 96, yes,
Speaker 361
2:33:07
sir. Thank you, Representative Longstrom, and then Representative Wooten. Thank you. I
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
2:33:12
just had a quick question. You had mentioned a few cities.
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:33:15
What cities were those again? We had looked at, in addition to the Franklin County, We also were in Clarksville,
Alma, Fort Smith, Greenwood, Huntington, Mansfield, Rudy. That we looked
Speaker 257
2:33:37
at sites. Oh, I'm sorry. Did you want all of them? I'm just writing them down. I'm just curious,
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
2:33:43
out of all those cities, and they wanted the prison to come in their backyard.
Speaker 216
2:33:51
No, ma'am. No, ma'am, I didn't mean to insinuate that earlier. I was, when I was speaking with, addressing Senator Hill, what I was meaning was those were locations where you would have all of that infrastructure, but they would be, you know, within a municipality.
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
2:34:06
Okay. Is there something wrong with having it within a municipality? We have manufacturing and other things in a municipality. I understand there's some municipalities that wanted to have the prison. Who are those? The
Speaker 287
2:34:19
municipalities that expressed an interest and provided a proposal were Fordyce, Marshall in Searcy County,
Speaker 216
2:34:30
and then Prescott Hope teamed together on sites that were, one was in Hempstead County, and the other one was pretty close by in neighboring Nevada County, just across the county line. Okay, and they wanted
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
2:34:43
to have those? Yes, ma'am. And
Speaker 216
2:34:46
as I mentioned earlier, all of those were, the reality is they were all in the wrong spot. In the
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:34:56
radius of the other correctional facilities.
Except for the Marshall, and it was
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
2:35:04
not large enough. It was 40 acres. Right, it was 40 acres. So we're worried about cannibalizing employees. Why
not just pay them all enough that we'd want to have more employees? I mean, I'm
Speaker 359
2:35:15
not understanding why we'd worry about that if we could just pay folks to come to work. at a
Speaker 216
2:35:21
at a at a big picture scale it's sustainability population
Speaker 364
2:35:25
um if you look at and i've actually prepared this for um uh one of the board members um let me actually staffing
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:35:32
obviously department of corrections would be better suited in answering
Speaker 224
2:35:38
that question okay fair enough i appreciate that the information i can share really off the
Speaker 216
2:35:44
top of my uh chart here is that from 2019 to 2023 on our population, 11 of our current DOC facilities are in counties where the population is declining. That's a population decline area. Then when we jump forward and we look from, or jump backwards to look at the period 2010 to 2019, 13 out of our, so in that last decade,
13 out of our 20 DOC facilities are in population-declined counties. And so the best way I can express it is that 100 years ago, our prisons were mostly in the right place. Fast forward, they're not all in the right place anymore. And it's because of our population growth, which is toward western and northwestern Arkansas. Don't argue that at
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
2:36:29
all. I see it all every day in northwest Arkansas. Yes, ma'am. All right.
I'll hop out and get back in if
I need to. Thank you. And if you wanted to try to put that in Northwest Arkansas, Representative Longstrom would probably help you. Oh, I've got her back
Speaker 240
2:36:48
in the queue already. Okay, members,
I've got three plus Representative Longstrom I'm going to go to. Please be as quick as you can. I'm going to wrap these up. We've got two more that I want to get to. Representative Wooten, you recognize. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
2:37:06
And I'll try not to use my coaching voice, but I want clarification on one question. Did you say that you cut it down to two miles within
Speaker 224
2:37:21
an interstate? In our modeling, we were looking at that to try to narrow
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
2:37:29
the total numbers that we were trying to sift through. Okay, so with 1,000 miles of interstate in Arkansas, roughly, it's actually 9,885, or 985, you couldn't find the site?
Speaker 224
2:37:43
Not further than 60 miles from one of the existing prisons, which was one of
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
2:37:49
our other criteria. But you could find the site? We did. Okay, well, but it's 23.3 miles off the interstate. No,
Speaker 364
2:37:57
we did find sites that were on interstate. Well, did you
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
2:38:01
share that with the governor's office? We reported all the sites. Or the Department of Correction? Yes, sir. Okay, that's fine. My next question is, do you still, and you may not be able to answer this,
but do you still stand by the $825 million number? That's not our
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:38:22
role. I'm sorry, sir. do what that's not our
Speaker 200
2:38:28
role in this is to to to clarify or to quantify the cost for the correctional facility i
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
2:38:37
could not understand what you said that's really
Speaker 200
2:38:40
not our role to be able to clarify or justify the cost for
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
2:38:45
the prison facility we're just working with the property so the 825 million is that number viable from the governor's office or the department of
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
2:38:55
correction can you answer that I believe the state agency the I believe the Department of
Speaker 167
2:39:04
Correction with their owner's representative came up with that number yes
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
2:39:11
sir okay thank you thank you mr. chairman representing Rob you recognize yes sir thank you mr. chairman there's people in this room that can remember only a few years ago that we were working on matching money for highways if we come up with 50 this the feds would come up
with 200 million we barely made that now we've got counties that were paying around $40 a person to be in incarcerated but we're gonna spend 85 million I mean 85 thousand on on your your proposed way of doing things you know I just wonder if we've really checked this out like we should thank
Speaker 410
2:40:04
you rep senator matt brown thank you mr chair uh you had mentioned an eight inch water line where was that at you had two highways was it 215
Speaker 287
2:40:21
highway 217 yes i think that's right let me double check that for you sir yeah it comes up to
It comes up alongside James Road, and it comes up to a tower that is on a tank that's on Ridge Road. Do you know about how far that is from the location? Yeah, it's a little over two miles. And then follow up,
Speaker 414
2:40:52
Mr. Chair. Earlier there was some testimony about there wasn't any power out there, but it looks to me like there's a high-voltage line that crosses the middle of the property. Is that correct? Correct. Yes, sir. All right, thank you, Mr. Chair.
Okay, members, my board went blank. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your testimony. Appreciate your time. Mr. Chair, I
Speaker 259
2:41:12
didn't get a 100% opportunity to respond to Senator Hill's original question, the very one.
Speaker 216
2:41:18
Wrap that up quickly. Yes, sir, I'll be very quick. I just wanted to acknowledge my team that worked on this. I had a total of eight staff working on this, assisting in the project. Three of those staff hold master's degrees in agriculture, forestry, and community and regional planning.
Six of my staff hold bachelor's degrees in geography, political science, and history. I have one registered forester on staff. I have one person on my staff that's a level four certified appraiser from the assessment coordination division. And I also have two licensed surveyors. When we put that team all together, I have over 100 years of combined experience and career. And so I would like to make sure that the committee is aware that we did have experience.
Thank you all. Okay, members, a quick break before I bring the last two up. And let me just state this, if you'll listen to me in just a minute. It's evidently been said that my co-chair and I were contacted that Mr. Perfury was not going to be here. That is false. i was contacted by governor staffer yesterday my co-chair was contacted by different governor staffer yesterday and mentioned that mr johnson miss laidlaw were going to be here
and i said thank you they said i just wanted to notify the chairs i said i appreciate that i did not ask specifically and they did not mention mr perry's name so at this time i will entertain a motion it will take a two-thirds vote of separate houses since the senate's chairing today it'd be the senate first i'll entertain a motion to authorize the co-chairs begin the process issuing a subpoena as authorized by law i have a motion to have a second i have a second i have a
second in the senate i gotta say thank you uh all in favor aye opposed okay members i've heard house over here house can't vote in this separate chambers y'all have your chance the senate does senate members of the
committee only all in favor aye opposed no fails thank you
Next up, we have Chairman of the Board of Corrections, Benny Magnus. If you come up, and Board of Corrections member Lee Watson, we request you to be here. We appreciate y'all being here. We appreciate your patience. Not the first time y'all been to the table, so you know the routine. And while you're standing,
let me issue that if you'll punch that microphone and tell us your name first.
My name is Benny Magnus. Did you punch the button
Speaker 422
2:44:24
there? My name is Benny Magnus with the Arkansas Board of Corrections. My name
Lee Watson
Unverified
2:44:28
is Lee Watson with the Arkansas Board of Corrections. Okay, thank you.
If you raise your right hand, do you solemnly swear to affirm that the testimony you're about to give be the truth of truth nothing but the truth yes i do thank both
of you please take a seat you gentlemen have any statements no sir just here to ask your question
appreciate that and first up i have
representative mayberry you're recognized There we go.
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
2:45:06
Thank you so much for allowing me to ask a question. So it kind of got mentioned, Representative Long asked the question, and I just want to expand a little bit more because I think this is probably a little bit more in your wheelhouse.
So is this just too big of a project, 3,000 prison bed, prison? Was there ever discussion when finding the location was becoming difficult that maybe we don't need 3,000 all in one spot, that we need to separate it into three 1,000-bed prisons? Was that ever discussion before or were we just so set on it's got to be all in one place and moving forward, is that possibly a solution so we can divide out the workforce and possibly find a place that has water enough to meet?
I'll just kind of open that up and
Speaker 432
2:46:05
see if you can answer. Well, I'll try to
Chair
Unverified
2:46:08
answer it. You'd have to go back to some of the historical ways we participated in trying to build prisons in the past or attempted to build prisons. I was involved in the new prison construction at Malvern, Arkansas, and we did it similar to what we started in prior to this administration taking over. We put out fillers to ask people to apply, for communities to apply.
And at that point, it was at that time we were looking at possibly a 1,500-bed facility, if I remember correctly. And so that, shortly after the administration that's here now, seeing a need of more beds, of 3,000, Sometimes in the larger facilities are easier, excuse me, more cost-efficient to run or to build
because each facility has to have a school, each facility has kitchens. So when you build multiple ones, you multiply that. So in some arguments that a larger facility is more cost-efficient. So in the past, we have done it opposite the way it was done this time. The method that we had used in the past was taken away from us
and that the administration would look for a site for a 3,000-bed prison. And a 3,000-bed prison, I don't know where that number came from. I would say that me and Mr. Watson might disagree a little bit in that area. I see a need for 3,000 beds. The county is hurting. We're at 2,000 now. We have 10,000 inmates or parolees that's esconded from justice.
So I believe with the future and three years coming and the growth of the state, I see the need in 3,000. I'm not saying it needs to
Lee Watson
Unverified
2:48:28
be in one place. To answer part of your question, we weren't involved in that discussion. That was not something that basically happened without
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
2:48:35
the board's involvement as far as that specific number. i will tell you at the end of 2022 where we were was that we had 75 million dollars to expand calico rock or north central whichever you want to call it and that cost had gone up i think
governor hutchinson had backed off his support because the price had gone up i think from 75 million to 125 million 125 we were ready to pull the trigger on that and start moving on that The architectural and engineering work was done, and we were ready to move. But there were what happened in that instance. There were some lay of the land issues that increased the cost also. It wasn't just inflation. And at that point, we were looking at, as I remember, it was 1,002 to 1,500 beds.
And then when our new secretary came in, that was all pushed to the side. and the march
Lee Watson
Unverified
2:49:35
was on for a 3,000-bed facility. Do you
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
2:49:43
think that that might be a feasible option moving forward if we're talking? I understand the cost. It makes sense, one kitchen, one school, et cetera, but if we're not going to be able to have the water to get there to meet the needs of a 3,000-bed prison
and having to spend so much more on those other infrastructure things, might it be something to look at at choosing three different locations or some other variable like that is that something that you all will consider absolutely i think the main thing we
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
2:50:13
need more beds i mean i think that's something everybody in the room behind us and behind me in front of me everybody can agree upon we need more beds as quickly as we can add beds we've added almost 1500 more beds into facilities but i will tell you today i looked at the numbers our department
corrections facilities are filled to 109 capacity that's not safe for the officers it's not safe for the inmates it's not safe for the general public so we we do need to move and a while back i wrote a letter to some members of the legislature and my focus was how can we most rapidly add beds we've we've squeezed everybody in we can and if we can most rapidly add 500 beds at calico rock and 1,000 beds wherever with the plan, as soon as the money is available,
design it like you would a school or anything else that might expand, to add another 1,000 wing as soon as you can. However we get there, the fastest is the most important and most valuable
Chair
Unverified
2:51:21
to all of us, I think. Thank you. Senator Josh Bryant,
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
2:51:25
you recognize? Thank you, Mr. Chair. I guess only one question that I had based on this presentation from the citizens group is there's a statement, I think it was item number three of a slide that said to reduce the minimum requirements for basically the rehabilitation and the classrooms
down to minimum ACA standards. Can you explain what that means in terms of footprint? And was that a board decision or was that an executive branch governor's decision?
Chair
Unverified
2:51:53
ACA, I'm sure you're talking about American Correctional Association. when you use that term. They do have guidelines for us for sales on how many feet of area for each inmate. Proudly enough, the state of Arkansas is ACA accredited in every unit we have.
And not all states are 100% accredited in all their facilities. We are. And so, you know, in building the prison, It's not been determined yet how hard you build that prison. And what that means is whether you're building 50-man barracks, 25-man barracks, two-man sales.
There's so much that comes into the building of a prison to be able to operate it and also to build it with what money and needs you need. So people in corrections, professionals, like to have single-man sales. They're easy to maintain, very expensive. And Arkansas probably cannot afford to have a facility. We have one that's almost single-man sale.
It's called Norse Max. We can't hardly afford that in our facilities to go that far hardened. Okay, do you know if that, at one time were
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
2:53:24
we anticipating doing more than what this minimum standards were to create a system that was different than Varner Cummins unit or less, maybe less hard, just as secure but more about pushing out rehabilitation programs than we've shrunk it, or has that never really been a discussion? I don't recall the board ever
Lee Watson
Unverified
2:53:43
being involved in that sort of conversation.
Speaker 454
2:53:49
Ms. Laylaw made several statements a few times about that they
Chair
Unverified
2:53:54
were working with DOC, DOC. We had, the board had laid out some floor mats of not so close to another unit to rob our staff. We did set some criteria, but when she said she was talking to DOC, I can only assume that she was talking to Secretary Perfea because he wasn't including us in
Speaker 454
2:54:21
all those conversations or those decisions.
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
2:54:24
Okay. And then final question, just because I've only been to Varner Cummins about three times for a tour, just to understand it, I've never really went and looked at the utility side of Supermax. My understanding is that it's served by three wells and that there's the appropriate treatment at the at the well heads to feed that facility a facility like this that does not have access to that type of well water I assume we have prisons that use you know 500,000 gallon towers
that are fed by an 8-inch line will more than enough sustain the capacity issues for a prison and refill overnight or do we feed all our wells directly with just a hard line
Speaker 454
2:55:08
or about half of our facilities are on municipal water and half of them are
Chair
Unverified
2:55:14
on their own water calico rock has two wells and one is 1285 feet deep and one of them is 70
Speaker 432
2:55:25
uh 750 feet deep and both of those feed a water tank i forget what size be way over 100 000 gallon
okay and how big is that facility it's right at uh it's rated for 850 we have 900
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
2:55:41
and something in there right now okay and then as far as the wastewater treated on site at
Chair
Unverified
2:55:47
most of those facilities or use a municipal system yeah and that was the what raised the cost of calico rock after we did our study in the uh expanding it we were at our maximum on our waste water and we were going going to have to update and expand our wastewater to be able to expand that other 400 and some
inmates at calico rock because we were and that's what raised our cost up some cost of the building supplies and and the wastewater plant caused us to have to give a figure of right around 125 million to governor hutchison all right all right thank you gentlemen represent right we're glad you
Representative Mark Perry
Unverified
2:56:30
were just taking a turn visiting not not wanting to be a permanent resident uh representative per
your you're recognized thank you chair i'll just go
Representative Chad Puryear
Unverified
2:56:43
back to would you gentlemen be able to answer a financial question try okay uh you may not be in the room when i asked it earlier but what's the total amount of money as of right now
Chair
Unverified
2:57:00
that this project that we've spent on this project sir it's not a it's not about approximate it's what the legislature and executive branch gives us to build with so if that's 825 million we may not be able to get but 25 2600 beds out of
Speaker 463
2:57:14
that 825 million i appreciate that response i'm not that
Representative Chad Puryear
Unverified
2:57:17
complicated of a question just how much have we spent on this project approximately right now not not
what can we build with what just kind of curious how
Speaker 432
2:57:28
far we are into this if i don't think i can answer that question without mr brown our uh okay our accountant
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
2:57:34
here well and i can give a little bit of information part of what was testified to earlier was the purchase price of the property i'm aware of that yes sir and i did check and with vanner i think we've spent somewhere between 900 pardon me they've billed us for 900 and some odd thousand i think 830 or so has been
paid we've declined some of those charges some of the
Representative Chad Puryear
Unverified
2:57:58
charges so we're in the media were safe to say we're under five million dollars as of today that'd be a under five million yes okay and do we know you know we talk about the what the water is going to cost and all that and i understand we
but what what are we going to have to spend to find out those approximate costs of getting the water here getting the electric lines upgraded uh sewer plant all the infrastructural costs alongside the building what are we going to have to spend to find those numbers roughly i don't have
Speaker 432
2:58:27
i don't have an answer for you we don't
Chair
Unverified
2:58:30
have our engineer or architect hard yet for this uh uh for that project to start
Speaker 468
2:58:36
going out trying to get those numbers for us
Speaker 327
2:58:40
and we just don't have that answer for you okay so
Senator John Payton
Unverified
2:58:47
so well i appreciate that thank you chair senator payton you recognize thank
you mr chair so y'all are both board members and there's an accusation made in these complaints that uh while the board removed mr profury uh and he was replaced
by secretary wallace that they're both share sharing the duties or or maybe secretary wallace is not able to fulfill the secretarial role and that it says specifically Mr. Profury is skirting his firing by the Board of Corrections by continuing at the helm of the Department of Corrections. Can you speak to that complaint? Who's running the Department of Corrections? I think that
Speaker 432
2:59:32
Senator, I mean I think that Mr. Profia works for the Governor and Secretary
Chair
Unverified
2:59:37
wallace works for us and that's the best way i can answer it for
Senator John Payton
Unverified
2:59:42
you so how much duplicity is there in those in there are two roles at this point how much they do together no how much does it overlap if they if you're giving them something to do and the governor's giving
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
2:59:56
them something to do how much overlap is there well
Lee Watson
Unverified
2:59:58
we don't give any we don't give mr prefer anything to do and in fact we have almost no communication with him and have had no communication since he was exited by the board
Senator John Payton
Unverified
3:00:08
okay so we you know we do know that so specifically where the where this complaint says mr profieri is skirting his firing by the border corrections by continuing at the helm of the department of corrections do you believe that to
Chair
Unverified
3:00:29
be true or not true he's he doesn't work for the board of corrections our correction now he works for the governor and if there any overlapping um
you know he tours our facilities at time to time and as a member of the governor's staff he's entitled to tour our facilities uh would be uh very uh i mean we
Speaker 432
3:00:53
wouldn't ever board of corrections would never try to uh say a member of the governor's office so if i could just to be
Senator John Payton
Unverified
3:01:00
brief let me try to frame it in a way where you can answer it uh who do you perceive is at the helm of the department of corrections secretary wallace
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:01:12
both of you agree in that okay thank you representative rose you recognize thank you mr chair
mr watson i just had a follow-up question on something you said in your earlier testimony i think it was in reference to and i wasn't sure if it was to three sites specifically or if it was a combination of expansions at different locations and additionally a side or two,
but some other form or fashion to getting somewhere to 2,500 or 3,500 beds. You said more or less whatever it takes to get this done the fastest. That's kind of the concept is find the solution that gets it done the fastest. We need beds. Yes, and I think corporately most are going to be in agreement that there is a problem with the number of prisoners we have and the places to put them. crowding, the cost on the state and the counties for housing prisoners in county jails, and
the inability maybe to effectively implement justice and imprison violent criminals, etc., etc. Those common talking points I think we mostly broadly agree on. When you said get this done the fastest, do you have an adequate timeline that you could walk through of site location the process of getting that done purchasing building staffing working with the community what that timeline would look like again
my two cents worth is the fastest way we
could add beds would be to first and simultaneously work on expanding north central that's only 500 beds we also need to look at and when we talk about beds keep in mind the word beds covers a multitude of types of beds we don't just need prison beds we also need community corrections and other facilities that make up some of those beds and one of the things the board was considering
back in 2022 was a facility for community corrections granted it was only 300 beds but that 300 beds would be 300 people that aren't in the county jail backup and so we need to look at that you know we've we lost a facility in washington county you know i'm from fort smith i can tell you um also when it comes to location part of the issue and and i can tell you from driving from fort smith to our facilities there aren't any on my part of the state or in my part of the state they're all south they're all central arkansas
and east um and northwest arkansas is the fastest growing i know benton and washington county are predicted to double in population in the next i think less than 10 years um we're in need of some of those types of facilities in in western and northwestern arkansas and um and i can tell you that sebastian county per capita i think probably sends more people in the department of corrections of any county in the state because we have very aggressive and effective prosecutor there that i think you all know dan shu but as far as the timeline
you know i i think i would have to defer to benny on that because he saw what happened and he worked through the malvern facility i've not been actively involved in the construction of a new facility
Speaker 454
3:04:47
and benny has usually takes from the time the site's picked to the time we open up three years minimum and that's
Chair
Unverified
3:04:53
not maximum that's that's minimum i don't believe we can get it done any quicker than that if we was turned loose tomorrow but we out because of where we're at now
we're not making we're not getting it done and um um you know a lot of the criteria that was talked about today a good example if if some a lot of people would come to calico lock into our our facility it's it's not near an interstate it's probably 100 and some miles from interstate it's not near a trauma center there's a lot of things that that site is similar to the site in
Franklin County and it works for
Speaker 432
3:05:39
us we have excellent staff there yes we had a grant hard and get away which is the first time somebody walked away from that facility in 35
Chair
Unverified
3:05:50
years but they're excellent staff and they do a good job and so but it's only 900 it's over capacity right now by about 70 or 80 maybe a little more
Speaker 482
3:06:07
around 900 something inmates there now and but it does work
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:06:12
follow up mr. chair quickly thank you
Mr. Watson, I just kind of want to give you a chance to come back to this. Sure. Kind of the genesis of my question was you saying this would be the fastest way to get this done or you want to see the fastest way to get this done. What is it that makes your proposal or that concept the fastest way to get it
done? Because a lot of the work is done at North Central. The architectural and engineering work is done, and we already have everything in place there to bring new staff on
because we have personnel there. That would be the fastest way to add 500 beds. The faster way than building a facility that might take three years is community corrections facilities of might be 200 or 300 in various places where they're needed around the state. Again, it's not going to be the one Band-Aid that cures it all, but it takes away from the county jail backup. you know, however many hundred beds we can add.
Speaker 454
3:07:13
One of the things that's important to say,
when she brought up Marshall, Arkansas,
Chair
Unverified
3:07:18
that had made an application, in our document that we put out for people to be interested, or communities to be interested, and some prison institutions, was also ACC centers, and they don't take the amount of ground because there are only 200 inmates, 300 inmates. They don't take the ground footprint rent that a prison does and that's what Marshall was interested in. Marshall was never interested or could have staffed even I don't I think they could have staffed maybe a larger facility but
but that's what they were interested in something like two or three hundred inmates. So when they say that Marshall applied they didn't apply for a thousand bed prison and they sure didn't apply for a 300 bed prison they applied for an ACC center so I think there's a little bit of mix up there from knowing what Marshall was asking
Speaker 455
3:08:10
for. Thank you Mr. Chair I'd like to hop back in if you get a moment. Get back
Chair
Unverified
3:08:18
in the queue please. Senator King in recognition. Thank you Mr. Chair
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
3:08:26
so you know like I said back in 2017 I
filed the bill to address this overcrowding I mean this overcrowding has been happening for basically a long time but it's really exploded starting back to 2011 and you know just like in rogers when i asked you you know i've always advocated in 2017 when you know coming up with a plan that a lot of these people didn't want to fund but if you increase and this is why rsa in the budget is so important because it determines the direction corrections has stayed eight percent of the budget since i went in eight percent this last time i
said in 17 said this correction should be 10 percent of the budget if we'd increase two more percent since 2013 or whenever corrections would have received 1.4 billion more dollars that's how important one percentage change in a budget goes and look in 10 years down the road 1.4 billion we wouldn't be in this mess but back to calico rock that's where as you said the fastest way to get there mr profieri shut down calico rock i mean we've already got everything there that he
shut down calico rock we could expand it 525 beds much faster much more economical there uh you know when you look at the inmate population as we've seen uh you know four counties contribute half our inmates to incarceration so if you take out pulaski county which always has wrightsville out here benton washington sebastian county uh you know we need to build facilities in benton washington county because if you look over a 50-year period just the cost of transport and prisoners alone
you know and the other thing is too and look at our needs that mr profury didn't look at is an intake facility i mean all the population is is growing in northwest arkansas i mean we're looking at the third district next time may only be three counties and so that thing that they never looked at, Proferi. Oh, here
Speaker 488
3:10:17
we go. Senator King, if you can finish the
Speaker 489
3:10:25
question. Yeah, I know how this goes when you get faxed.
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
3:10:31
So the question is, in looking at this thing, corrections is going to have to have their budget increased dramatically. It should have happened this line. If we don't do that, we are never going to solve this problem. And the second part is, why did Mr. Porfiri shut down Calico Rock expansion, which was economical? What do you know? He won't show
Chair
Unverified
3:10:52
up. Again, you'd have to ask him that question. And as far as funding from the Department of Corrections is up to the governor and to this legislative body.
We try to do the best we can with the money you all
Speaker 492
3:11:05
give us. And that's the only way I can answer that question. And that's what I
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
3:11:11
was saying. The overcrowding that was happening in 15-16 was because of lack of money going towards you guys, and I tried to correct that. So, anyway, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I don't have any more questions.
Chair
Unverified
3:11:24
Thank you. The main thing that needs to be said here, every governor has given us some money. We've increased bed space with almost every governor I've served.
I've been on the board 26 years. Every governor has gave us some money for some expansion. Not new facilities. Governor Sanders' dad was the first one that gave us money for a brand new facility at Melbourne. But we got money for expansion at Calico Rock, places in Pine Bluff. From every governor,
Speaker 468
3:11:57
we've added some beds. It's just we can't keep adding patchwork to places that we can't hire staff.
That's the problem, is we have to go somewhere where we can hire staff. You know, I can't go without saying that, you know, I appreciate this governor trying to build us beds. And if I had, if I was asked the question, what about three one-thousands? i really don't care if it's built on a mountain and i don't care how many we have to have beds
Speaker 448
3:12:41
now senator king before you jump in i know there's a cost factor there i get that but we have to start having beds listen i made the statement we have 10,000 absconders that
Speaker 432
3:12:54
are not coming in which we we catch them we bring that number down every so month and then it goes back up So another thing that we've got
Speaker 468
3:13:05
facing us in the future is a Protect the Arkansas Act when it was introduced and passed.
It starts dealing with our repeat offenders, and it should. It should deal with our repeat offenders. The problem is we're not going to have a place to put them, and that cycle has not started yet, but it will.
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
3:13:38
I'll wait for a question now. Thank you. Representative Wooten, you're recognized. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First of
all, Chairman Magnus and Member Watson, I want to commend y'all.
You've done an excellent job. I've seen the prison system and the changes that have been made, and it's outstanding with the limited finances that you had. I have seen it from the standpoint of being a trooper and having to go into two riots, one at Cummins and one at Tucker, as a result of overcrowding. So I know, and then I served a stint as DFA director, and I have never seen such a disaster as has been perpetrated on the people of Arkansas relative to this 3,000-bed prison.
Now to my question. Chairman Magnus, do you remember the conversation that we had in the lobby out here about four years ago? I'm sure you're going to remind me. It may have been. With age, I start narrowing the time frame down. But you told me then that we needed 2,000 beds and that we needed a unit 300 so we could incarcerate parolee violations of scounders and drug users.
They come in, they come in to the facility for parole violations or for parole review, and they come in and they're high on drugs and your people have to let
Speaker 492
3:15:20
them go. Is that true? Well, we built a facility. We bought
Chair
Unverified
3:15:26
a women's, no, excuse me, a juvenile facility at Batesville. Right. Batesville did not want to run it anymore, Independence County, I should say.
And we've bought it, remodeled it. Now we've got a 175-bed facility there for parole violators that we bring in for 90 days. We also have one next to the Malvern unit, Omega. And both of those function well. I sure wouldn't be against having another one. The one thing about parolees, if you can, studies will show you that when they are not complying with their parole requirements,
the best thing you can do instead of wait and wait and wait until they've got so far down the road that you have no other choice, but send them to prison is get a hold of them, put them in a facility, and give them 90 days. Hopefully they still have a job when they get out, but put
Speaker 482
3:16:32
them back out after 90 days. And that has served pretty well. We started that somewhere 22
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
3:16:40
years ago with Omega. Thank you. Mr. Watson, I read in the paper your proposal.
Have you presented that to the full board, or are you holding on to that, or what's the status of the proposal? And if you would, share what you
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:16:56
felt we needed to do. Well, pretty much what I've said today, we need to find
a way to add beds the fastest, whether it's North Central, community corrections, and then however much of a prison, however many beds the legislature is willing to fund. Because as Benny pointed out,
things are fairly, the growth is fairly predictable now, and it will be for the next four or five years, but it's expected that that's when the Protect Arkansas Act is going to start having a greater impact on our prison population. And we need to get ready for that. So we can't just fix the problem we have today. We need
Lee Watson
Unverified
3:17:36
to start planning for that for the future, for the next five or more years,
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
3:17:43
five to ten years. Thank you. Thank both of you, again, for your leadership and direction at the corrections.
Mr. Chairman, regardless of how the Senate feels, I still think that we need to let them know over there and Mr. Perfori that he is either going to come over here or we're going to take his pay away from him. And I don't care how the senators feel about it, but it's a slap in the face of every one of you. And you voted not to subpoena him to come in here. And that does not sit very well with me. And I know a lot of you don't care how things sit with me, but that's fine, too.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I understand the concern and have similar feelings. If
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
3:18:29
you gentlemen will be sure you're getting a little relaxed, pull your microphones to you and you can still be relaxed. Okay. Getting a little
Chair
Unverified
3:18:38
bit light. Representative Matt Brown. Thank you, Mr.
Speaker 150
3:18:49
Chair. Speaking of the follow-up on the comment on planning for the future,
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
3:18:54
What is the current backlog in the county jails right now as we sit here today? I'd say
Speaker 468
3:19:00
right around 2,200. I don't check it daily anymore, but it'll be hovering right around 2,200 backed up in the county jail. Fault, Mr. Chair. So even if we added these 500 beds
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
3:19:13
at Calico Rock, that's not really making a dent to the current backlog we have right now when we're already at 109% capacity, I think y'all said earlier. So, I mean, wouldn't it make more sense to build a new facility of 3,000 beds, regardless of where it's built?
But wouldn't it make sense to build a facility where we can start, you know, getting capacity for the future?
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:19:36
Instead of another stopgap measure? I think what we've seen for the last year and a half is the efforts toward this 3,000-bed facility have derailed the plans to add 500 beds at Calico Rock, some community corrections facilities that may add up to 1,000, um and then serious work on a long term whether it's 1 000 uh with the design so that it can be
expanded as the funds are available but anyway uh if if if we could get a 3 000 bed facility built
faster than we can do any of those things i'd be 100 for it resident brown
Speaker 432
3:20:13
i have a different answer to that that
Chair
Unverified
3:20:15
it depends on whether you built that 3 000 bed facility in segments If you build it in segments, it would serve maybe the same position as adding Calico Rock. But if you try to build the whole facility as a whole, we're going to be in a lot more trouble,
and the county's going to be in a lot more trouble waiting on that facility to open. But if you build it in segments, which I've talked to the Van Aire and the contractor and stuff about doing it in segments. And that's why it needs to be built to
Speaker 468
3:20:56
make some beds come online sooner. Well, I mean, I don't care how
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
3:21:01
it's built, if it's in phases or what. I mean, my concern is we literally have child rapists being let out of the pen
Speaker 157
3:21:10
because we don't have enough room. Why can't we put these people in jail
Speaker 455
3:21:14
and keep them there? It's to protect
Speaker 468
3:21:16
society. Sir, the Board of Corrections doesn't let people out. Do we vote on the EPA to let them out 90 days early? Yes, we have and done it for years. But then they are reviewed by the parole board. The Board of Corrections does not vote to put somebody out on the street. That's not our job. It never has been our job. Now, we have voted to move their eligibility 90 days early because at the request of the county jails or whatever it may be.
If you go back in history, I didn't vote for all the EPAs. I didn't vote for them. But I can tell you right now that it's going to really hurt. If we did an EPA right now, we have two on the books. One is 90 days, which covers everyone. And we have one that is a one-year, moves the eligibility date one year, and it has to be 100% nonviolent, very restrictive,
who will qualify for that one-year EPA. But then it goes, and I wish Mr. McCastle here are a parole board because I'm not trying to throw them under the bus, but then it goes to the parole board to review those names to decide whether to put them out on the street. That's a fact. Well,
Speaker 482
3:22:34
I don't think that my question insinuated that you
Speaker 417
3:22:38
were voting to let people out, and I don't mean to insinuate that if you took it that way. But my concern is just
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
3:22:45
that I'm hearing you all say we've got a plan for the future, but I think Calico Rock at best is a stopgap when we need to do something
that's actually going to fix the problem
Speaker 432
3:22:56
for the future. The only reason I don't think Calico Rock's just a complete stopgap is because of the type of facility it's been and the type of people we've had. We've never had, through my whole tenure on the board, certain prisons all the time has had trouble staffing people. We've never had a problem at Calico Rock, never. Good. It's always been, never been over 5%. So I don't look at Calico Rock necessarily as a stopgap as more as I do a viable facility.
If you tried to turn, but that's my opinion. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:23:32
One thing I'd like to add regarding the EPA, that has not been exercised since January of 2023. So for two and a half years, the EPA has not been used. And traditionally, before that, going back to 1986, it was used to alleviate overcrowding. And that was the only
Lee Watson
Unverified
3:23:54
tool in the tool bag, if you will, for overcrowding.
Chair
Unverified
3:23:59
Thank you. Senator King, you recognize. Thank
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
3:24:03
you, Mr. Chair. To follow up, and I shut off
last time, you know, Mr. Magnus, Chairman Magnus, we've talked about this. Mr.
Watson, you know, it's just like in simple construction is why the site location is so important. If your site location and you've got to go to Fort Smith and you've got to go revamp these water systems, you're talking more time, more money. If your site prep is $250 million versus $50 million, that means less beds. Anybody in construction, common sense, can understand that. So that's why this site location is so important that if you pick a site location that's going to, the site prep and the road structure, you know, 96, there's grass growing up in the roads.
It's not going to handle thousands of concrete trucks and construction. I mean, Mr. Magnus, we go back. You remember Highway 65 when Missouri expanded it from Branson and did that? There was four or five construction companies went bankrupt because they did not do the site location and understanding the rock and everything. That's the big thing. So I'm just saying, whatever site location, we all agree we've got to increase beds, increase them faster. But we also have to look down the road. If corrections does not receive a more percentage of the budget, and that's including if revenues keep going up and we don't go into budget shortfall or downtime, which I've experienced.
These things, I was in D.C., these ideas that we're going to keep getting bailouts, that's happened in 10 and that. I talked to Senator Bozeman. He said, don't expect any more bailouts. So if we go back to the old days of shortfalls, not having enough money, it's even worse. But looking at our time, and you're going out, Mr. Magnus, is if we, like this last budget, corrections was only 8% of the budget. If it had been 10%, that your corrections would have got $130 million more. Well, you can do more with money. So in the long term of us, if I get another four years, I'll be gone.
Five years from now, six years from now, we won't see 1,000 prisoners up there. We're going to be out of $1 billion. And we're not, I mean, look at Alabama and Utah. So if corrections would have – this is what is so important, these guys rubber stamp RSA at the end of the year, and it has got to have more operating money because we're in this situation because the legislatures haven't been budgeting enough money.
Speaker 492
3:26:20
Well, that's not our call. Now, when you talk about Utah, I toured that facility.
Chair
Unverified
3:26:24
I understand why their cost was what it was. I kind of get what happened to them, and why their cost was so high. But there again, how much money we receive is up to the governor and up to you all. That's right. And we, you know, the comments was made a while ago, and I meant to bring it up. When Senator Bryant brought up about the ACA, the Arkansas Department of Corrections is in the top three echelon of ACA.
Speaker 422
3:27:04
And we also do it cheaper in 24 than any other state in the union. No question. You
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
3:27:11
guys are one of the most efficient, economically operating prison systems in our country. No question.
Speaker 496
3:27:16
And we don't get credit for that. No,
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
3:27:19
you don't get credit for that, and I agree with you. But I'm just saying on the site prep, what is so critical about this, it's just common construction math. If you're allocating $750 million and your site prep, if we've seen these figures out with Fort Smith, the $240 million to revamp their system, maybe you drill down and get water.
Okay, fine. But if the site prep is $250 million, that only leaves you $500 million to build beds. If you're taking $750 million and your site prep is $50 million, that leaves $700 million to build more beds. That is why it's so critical to pick the right location. It's critical to
Speaker 492
3:27:51
pick a location, but also some of the numbers you come up with is pulling
Chair
Unverified
3:27:56
them out of thin air. I don't know what it's going to cost. Okay, we're going to wrap here in a minute.
I've got Representative Cavanaugh, then Representative Beattie. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
3:28:13
Talking about expansion, is expansion an option at Grimes or McPherson? No, ma'am. And why is that? Because
Speaker 492
3:28:25
we can't staff them. You can't get enough people to staff. I think we're at, I've got
Speaker 432
3:28:32
the number here somewhere. I was looking at it a couple days ago, and we just can't. McPherson right now and Grimes,
Chair
Unverified
3:28:41
we're 2,369 inmates, and we're running right at 50 percent.
Maybe it's down to 45 percent or something like that in staffing, and it's been that way prior to COVID, and we still can't. In fact, we're doing stuff at Newport we don't normally do. We're trying to get people hired there. We're doing our training right there. We're doing our academy at Grimes and stuff to try to get people. And why is it that you can't staff there? Just not the people there, I guess, in that county.
Independence draws from, I'm trying to think what county, I know it well, Newport's in, but Independence is next to it. Do I? Yeah, Jackson. Jackson County. We just have trouble there, and we just can't staff them. Okay, thank you. Representative Rose, you recognize? Thank you, sir. Mr. Watson, I
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:29:44
just wanted to follow up on our conversation a minute ago.
Sure. Kind of the sales pitch to solve the problem was the 500-bed expansion, north-central. And then I think when I was listening to you and Chairman Magnus, to 200 to 300 bed community correction facilities several of them yes it would be 8 to 10 roughly just to get to that 3,000 bed number if they're 200 to 300
it would take 8 to 10 to plus the 500 to
Chair
Unverified
3:30:23
be 3,000 recommendation to build that many ACC beds and what we call ACC beds really not ACC beds anymore it's all part of ADC but no sir we would not need that or want that many beds and an ACC facility I think what
Lee Watson
Unverified
3:30:39
I'd what I'd suggested was as many as three or four which would be you know roughly
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:30:45
a thousand beds you know if we could find locations where we have the need for for all of
those so I think what the not
what I was trying to get to I
think we're already discussed we've got a 1,700 bed backlog or 1,700 prisoner backlog, and based on the projections we talked about last month, by 2031, we'll have roughly 3,000 prisoner population growth here in Arkansas. So we're looking at 1,700 that we already don't have room for plus another 3,000 in five years, and this is why I go back to, I love hearing options and alternatives, but
two to three hundred beds here or five hundred beds here doesn't get us to three thousand it doesn't get us to forty
seven hundred and so i just come back to timeline and solutions i'm i'm happy to hear them but i haven't
heard them yet well and my point there's those are things that could be brought online faster no they're not the total solution and we are going to need a large facility um as benny mentioned as i mentioned if it could begin as if we could get the funding for a 1,000-bed facility, get that built, and then funding to expand it and move that as
rapidly as possible, because you're right, in five to ten years, we're going to need the 3,000 beds. But just as importantly, we need some of these other types of beds, too, and the community corrections, or the, anyway, they all fall under corrections. We move them over from the community correction side, but we need beds both for people that sentenced directly from drug courts and also for parole violators who we know are going to come in for 90 days and then go back out and especially for those types of prisoners they are beds
those types of facilities keep them in their community where hopefully they can get out and and you know reintegrate better quick follow-up mr. chair um quick
Speaker 240
3:32:45
back get back in the queue I may or may not thank you, Representative Beattie, committee member. Thank you, Mr.
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
3:32:53
Chair. I guess my question is for Board Member Watson. I recall your letter. I read your letter. It had a lot of conjecture in there as far as what you would like to see
and proposals that you drafted to send to the legislature. My question is, and I'm only going to ask this question as chairman magnus mentioned that would not be the recommendation i've been here almost five years a little over five years and i haven't i don't think i've ever heard a recommendation or request from corrections to add beds since i've been here i know there have been discussions about that but
i've never heard anything directly from the department on the addition of beds i haven't heard that there was a plan or anything else within your department to add the capacity one thing i will say is i agree with senator king it's going to take more money on corrections and i think every one of us in this room that voted for the protect act knew that at that point and also at every session when we come in and we add additional offenses and additional time served we're just
exponentially increasing the problem so my question have you ever asked for additional beds and made a request to the legislature and been denied and secondly have you ever made a request to the legislature for anything that you needed at corrections and been denied well as the somewhat new guy
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:34:23
on the board even though i've been on the board for five years and working with benny he's told me that those requests have always been from him to the governor so from the board to the governor
Speaker 492
3:34:37
right and then because she's not gonna yeah if she's not gonna
Speaker 432
3:34:41
put it in her balance budget to you i say her because we have a her right now because that's not fair because she has tried to
Speaker 526
3:34:51
give us beds that's obvious okay uh but but in the past we've tried
Speaker 468
3:34:58
we've requested more beds and i the setting here and thinking you've been here five years you say i've been here 26 and i know that we've requested beds and we have gotten beds we never have gotten a new one except for governor huckabee at malvern that's the only new one but we just
before i got on the board they finished newport which came through the governor but the bottom line is is we have added beds we had a facility closed in pine bluff and governor beebe gave us the money to to remodel it and put it back online so we got in beds from other governors we just have not gotten a big jump to solve the problem because we keep growing at two percent if you grow
two thousand and eight years of a governor's uh term but he gives you a thousand guess
Speaker 495
3:36:00
what you're in the hole a thousand and that's just why it's
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
3:36:06
been working unfortunately and it's really just been an exponential problem since we removed that epa from you where you couldn't release those prisoners out and free up bed space to take over some of the overcrowding that we're having in our counties that right now our local law enforcement and our judges we can't affect uh true um the
judicial side in our counties because there's there's not capacity so we're all hurting at that level yeah representative Beatty
Speaker 468
3:36:32
we've had as many requests from law enforcement to do the EPAs if we have not to do it we've had more okay that's yeah but right now if we did an EPA right now we were looking at the numbers the other day with our consultant we could release 600 inmates on the 90 day not the one year but on the 90 day and that's the one that is kind of like troublesome
because it there may be a few classes of inmates like murder or something like that that doesn't get out but that's the one the 90 days almost covers everybody like an armed robber somebody that commits arm robbery but the one year epa it has to be total non-violent but we right now if we did just a 90 day my my assumption the other day from talking to consultant i
Speaker 432
3:37:29
think she told me 600 inmates if we could do it right now it saves 600 beds
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:37:35
but keep in mind with those epas those
are inmates that are going to get out at the end of that 90-day period or one-year period regardless. So it probably doesn't make it smell any better. I mean, I don't think anybody likes the idea of that, but it's been the only tool in the toolkit since 1986. So anyway, I'm not one to overly want defend the EPA because like Benny it bothers me but at the same time when you realize this person's
going to get out in 90 days anyway and and if the process takes longer it might just be 30 days
or 20 days but again that's a bed where you can bring prisoners
Speaker 432
3:38:22
in from the counties also the EPA got to be non it was not when you do it every 90 days
Speaker 468
3:38:28
it just got to be releasing everybody 90 days it wasn't the emergency that it was designed to do to
Speaker 432
3:38:35
release when you got to i've been on the board when we got up to 3200 people backed up in the
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
3:38:43
county jail last last comment mr chair uh just
kind of balance the power and if you need funding ask for funding where does funding where is funding approved but we've heard we've heard no request so i'm telling you if that's an issue balance of power ask thank you good point all right i've got two
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
3:39:12
left on here we're not going to take any more after that i've got
um uh crawford and rose are you still in you got one more question get yours out of the way thank you mr. chair wait a minute i got the wrong one but
Speaker 532
3:39:28
did i get you you got me okay good i appreciate that thank you i want to
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:39:35
give you each an opportunity to comment we were talking about the backlog of beds and the prison population growth goes beyond the backlog i'm sure you're aware and we could pull out different numbers i think the latest number i heard is 169 000
unserved or unpursued warrants in the state if we don't do something it's not just the prisoners we don't have somewhere to place that are already it's the criminals that aren't even being arrested and aren't being locked up we're implementing the protect act we're trying to hold the violent worst offenders off our streets I just like for your your commentary on how do we How do
we handle that, and how do we protect our Kansans?
Speaker 432
3:40:20
Do what Governor Sanders requested, and let's build a prison.
Speaker 432
3:40:28
little closer? The people watching online can't hear you. What Governor Sanders has recommended is to build
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:40:38
a prison. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Not going to get any argument out
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
3:40:44
on me on that point. Representative Crawford, you recognize. Thank
you. I'm up here. Got you. How many nonviolent do we have in our prisons right now?
Speaker 468
3:40:54
Do you know? Well, I gave a number the other day at Rogers, and I need to revisit that to make sure I give you all the right number. I
Speaker 432
3:41:05
gave it Rogers. It was probably about 48, and I don't even remember which side it fell on, pretty close to 50-50. but I also know that some of our staff was trying to research that again and
Speaker 468
3:41:15
found out that that might not be correct. If you want me to, I'll get you that number and get it to
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
3:41:22
the chair. Okay, and thank you for that.
One more question. What is your thought about possibly splitting the population and looking at a mental health facility? I know you've heard that argument. What do you think? I
Speaker 432
3:41:40
think almost everywhere in the United States, the prison system has also become a mental institutions. And we get it all the time.
Now, I will tell you that in my opinion, which I'm sure not a doctor. I'm farthest from that. Sometimes on the free world, they medicate them too much. We find that quite often we bring them into prison. They might be under six, four different medications, and then we pare it down to one or two, and they operate fine. But that's just my opinion. So what happens is when that person comes off that medication, has mental health medications, more than likely something's going to happen.
And it's not usually good, and
Speaker 539
3:42:31
they end up with us. All right. And some of our facilities,
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
3:42:35
for instance. Can you get closer? For instance, Malvern. Basically, when you talk about inmates and you talk about beds, we have inmates that would look like a wing at a nursing home because they're elderly, they may have dementia, they have all sorts of health problems. We have medical wings. You know, we hope to have grand opening here soon on our new facility here in Little Rock that's for women,
mainly for, there's basically two wings. They're for inmates that are pregnant or have just given birth, and then the other wing
is for women with serious health problems that basically need nursing home-type care. And that's
Speaker 448
3:43:16
another example. It's only a 150-bed facility, but that's another example of us adding beds
Speaker 468
3:43:22
everywhere we have a chance. When we do that, it does raise our cost. So when I said we're the cheapest in the nation, I said in 2024.
I don't know what it would be in 2025. But when we do that, it does raise our cost because those smaller
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
3:43:42
facilities do cost more to operate. Okay. One more and I'm through. How much are you guys utilizing the reentry facilities that are privately owned across the state that are not full?
Speaker 432
3:43:55
We try to use all we can. I heard that testimony the other day, and the gentleman was here. I don't see him now. He was here from Hidden Creek, and he'll tell you right now we've got more inmates in his beds.
Speaker 468
3:44:09
But we have a couple of roadblocks of those programs. We run out of money, and there again, Representative Beatty made it clear, we asked for more money, but we're going to have to have more money if we're going to keep those beds filled, number one. And number two, people got to understand about reentry. It's not that they just can pick an inmate up. That inmate can be chosen, then it has to be approved by the parole board to be able to go reentry.
There's a process because at reentry they're
Speaker 495
3:44:43
getting out, you know, we're talking about EPA. Well, that inmate that goes to reentry getting out of prison early, 16 months early, 18 months early. Yeah, he has to go to reentry part of that time, but he's also getting out early. But
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
3:45:04
if our prisons are overloaded, if 50% or less are nonviolent, I think
we need to rethink what we're doing in our prison population.
Speaker 432
3:45:17
Ma'am, I've been saying that for about five to ten years. Well, then we agree. I'm not sure. That's the reason Mr. Watson now is even bringing up our treatment center type stuff. right they're important they do a good job
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
3:45:39
thank you okay that was a last question thank you gentlemen for
being here we appreciate the difficult job you do mr. Watson I've complimented
you publicly in the media and I will again thank you appreciate that for thinking maybe outside the box not through with you yet outside the box and I appreciate your comment that you'd like to have a little bit longer time to look at something before you send it on down the road and i say that here a
lot we we rush too much stuff through especially when tens of millions or hundreds dollars are involved you've got you've had a difficult job and you've done it a number of
years and we thank you because we don't we don't think about the stuff you have to every day and i know this is a lot of passion on on the issues where this is at but it's a difficult situation that a lot of people were in, so thank you all for being here. Well, thank you, Chair. For the citizens group, Ms. Cardenas, or if Mr. Watson, I didn't see if he's still here, do you all want to come back and make a brief
statement? If not, that's fine, but I – okay, yeah, I see Adam back there.
If you want to – and again, I appreciate all of it that testified today, staying for the entire uh meeting we we appreciate your input mr adam watson and
natalie cardenas you are recognized to wrap up
Speaker 545
3:47:22
uh so i took a couple quick notes which i'll just run
Adam Watson
Unverified
3:47:26
through a couple things that we can address
Speaker 48
3:47:30
from the other witnesses comments um so to miss laidlaw's comments about you know she realized that the roads were better from a different entry you know those emails that she sent were on july 8th and july 10th she had an in-person meeting with joe perfiri on july 12th and after that meeting there was no more dissent from tss about this project and as you saw it was under contract
a few weeks later so our question would remain if there was communication to her that indicated that there was better access from a different way why weren't those emails produced in our FOIA requests because we've not seen that you know I think we got off track from our specific complaint today which is understandable because there's a lot of topics going around that are worthy of discussion about this prison about the prison system overall etc but we were
under the impression that we would get to the heart of more of the issues in our complaint and I don't want to be too hard on the committee for this for sure but I didn't see a lot of evidence presented to dispute any of our claims As to the hardening and the design contract, I think a slide that we showed was referenced about the decrease in price.
That was not just due to ACA minimums. That was a design change from a three-wing facility with one wing to house maximum security, one for medium security, and one for minimum security. The current design contract proposed is for 2,500 dormitory-style beds and 500 double bunks. So I don't know how that aligns with the state needs, but I want everybody to be aware that that's the type of facility that we're looking at when it comes to hardening.
Outside of that, and probably to my earlier comment about the intent of us being here, being to get answers, I'm disappointed that a number of our upper chamber of the legislature were unwilling to even issue a subpoena to ask a governor's office representative to be here to answer questions. You know, to the comments about who runs the DOC and who's in charge, I think those are questions that Mr. Perfieri needs to answer.
But what's clear is that when committees of our legislature call for a representative of the DOC, Mr. Perfieri shows up to testify. Outside of that, I think we've covered everything on my
notes. Thank you, B. here, and I will comment on one reason I gave latitude. As
you said, we got off on some other things. It's all interconnected information is what this was about. today what most the audience is concerned about is their immediate need the more information the
legislature has the more we can understand the issue y'all have brought that before we get that out of news articles social media and all that so i hope there's more interest in that we'll see where this goes
Speaker 48
3:51:02
and i think information i think you're absolutely right and look that's why we we opened with we don't want this conversation to end today i think there is much more that should be discussed and brought up about this issue both regard with regard to the franklin county site and whatever we're going to do with that if anything but also regard with regard to
the prison system as a whole so i hope this isn't a closed matter we thank you for being
here today and for all in the audience that made the trip and took your day off and all we greatly appreciate that thank you members that have stayed other ones i realized had to go but this is all live stream You can go back and replay it, too, if
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
3:51:45
you want to. Anything else, Mr. Co-Chair? I'd just like to thank everyone that was here today that made statements. I think it brought a lot of light to what we discussed and did not know about during the session
because some of us knew nothing about what was happening and had no idea. And I think it brought a lot of light to what we were thinking was possibility or what it couldn't be possibility. Still don't know a whole lot, but we'll find out more, I'm sure, in the future. but thank you guys for coming and everyone that testified and everyone that asked questions and showed up today thank you with that we are adjourned
Agenda
A. Call to Order
B. Consideration to Approve the October 21, 2024, Meeting Minutes [Exhibit B]
C. Consideration of a Motion to Authorize Chairs to Approve Special Expenses Incurred by the Committee
D. Discussion of Citizens’ Complaint Regarding Franklin County Prison Proposal [Exhibits D1-D3]
E. Other Business
F. Adjournment
Documents
| Title | Type | Pages | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agenda — JOINT PERFORMANCE REVIEW (JPR), Sep 9, 2025 | Agenda | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit B - JPR Draft Minutes 10-21-2024 | Exhibit | 1 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit D1 - Citizen Complaint - Franklin County Prison | Exhibit | 6 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit D2 - DOC-Site-Assessment-1 | Exhibit | 49 | Official source ↗ |
| Exhibit D3- Citizen Complaints Timeline | Exhibit | 15 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout D1-FCO Suggested Committee Questions | Exhibit | 6 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout D2 - FCO Exhibit List | Exhibit | 5 | Official source ↗ |
| Handout D3 - JPR Deck | Exhibit | 152 | Official source ↗ |
Speakers
Speaker 8
Speaker 11
Senator Terry Rice Chair
Unverified
Speaker 25
Senator John Payton
Unverified
Speaker 39
Speaker 40
Adam Watson
Unverified
Speaker 48
Speaker 54
Speaker 56
Representative Jim Wooten
Unverified
Speaker 61
Corey Cox
Unverified
Speaker 68
Speaker 72
Speaker 75
Senator Gary Stubblefield
Unverified
Speaker 78
Speaker 79
Speaker 81
Speaker 86
Speaker 83
Representative Joy Springer
Unverified
Ann Laidlaw
Unverified
Speaker 96
Speaker 100
Speaker 3
Speaker 103
Speaker 108
Speaker 109
Speaker 111
Senator Bart Hester
Unverified
Speaker 67
Speaker 121
Speaker 126
Speaker 2
Senator Bryan King
Unverified
Speaker 117
Chair
Unverified
Representative Matt Brown
Unverified
Speaker 157
Senator Jonathan Dismang
Unverified
Representative Bruce Cozart
Unverified
Representative Robin Lundstrum
Unverified
Speaker 38
Senator Ricky Hill
Unverified
Speaker 201
Speaker 185
Speaker 210
Representative Jon S. Eubanks
Unverified
Speaker 216
Speaker 243
Speaker 248
Speaker 252
Speaker 192
Senator Jimmy Hickey, Jr
Unverified
Representative Brit McKenzie
Unverified
Speaker 283
Speaker 287
Speaker 224
Speaker 92
Speaker 289
Speaker 228
Representative Frances Cavenaugh
Unverified
Speaker 316
Speaker 204
Speaker 138
Representative Chad Puryear
Unverified
Speaker 200
Senator Mark Johnson
Unverified
Representative Cindy Crawford
Unverified
Speaker 355
Speaker 359
Speaker 254
Representative Wayne Long
Unverified
Speaker 259
Speaker 218
Representative Howard M. Beaty, Jr.
Unverified
Speaker 373
Speaker 374
Representative Mark Perry
Unverified
Representative R. Scott Richardson
Unverified
Speaker 382
Speaker 361
Speaker 257
Speaker 364
Speaker 240
Speaker 167
Representative Johnny Rye
Unverified
Speaker 410
Speaker 414
Speaker 422
Lee Watson
Unverified
Representative Julie Mayberry
Unverified
Speaker 432
Representative Ryan A. Rose
Unverified
Senator Joshua Bryant
Unverified
Speaker 454
Speaker 463
Speaker 468
Speaker 327
Speaker 482
Speaker 455
Speaker 488
Speaker 489
Speaker 492
Speaker 448
Speaker 150
Speaker 417
Speaker 496
Speaker 526
Speaker 495
Speaker 532
Speaker 533
Speaker 539
Speaker 545