BY JERRIE WHITELEY

HERALD DEMOCRAT

SHERMAN -- Mayor Bill Magers asked city leaders on Monday to fund one quarter of the expense to get accurate, up-to-date numbers on what it would cost to make the county's downtown jail last a couple more decades.

Magers said he has a quote of $45,000 from a company that has studied the jail before to see what it would take to make the building work well into the future. The council did not vote on the matter.

The request followed a slide presentation in which Magers told city leaders that the numbers used by those who want the jail moved out of downtown don't add up. He says they have been based on reports that both "overstated the population growth and overstated incarceration rates."

His call for a second look at the numbers received support from a member of county leadership. Gene Short, commissioner Precinct 4, said, "I agree with your assessment that there has been a lot of bad data used and misinformation presented throughout this process."

Short said the discrepancies continued this past weekend in an advertisement that ran in Sunday's edition of the Herald Democrat. In that ad, Grayson County Judge Drue Bynum said it costs the county $53.50 per inmate per day to keep an inmate in the county jail. Short said the county's auditor's report for fiscal year 2008 shows the actual cost to be well under that number at both maximum capacity and average population levels. Short said if the jail is at maximum capacity, it costs the county about $37.64 to keep inmates per day, and it costs the county about $43.89 per inmate per day at the average daily population rate. He told city leaders that on Monday the jail had 326 inmates.

Magers said the misrepresentation goes all of the way back to the previous reports on the jail issue. He showed council members four documents to back up his claims. They included a 2002 Wiginton report, the 2005-2006 Bogard Report, a December 2008 Hale Mills memo and a 2002 Isbell Engineering Report.

The issue about how many beds the county needs turns, Magers said, on a couple of issues. One of those is the county's population and its projected growth. Another issue is the incarceration rate which is broken down into average daily population and peaking (peak population) and classification. Those things, he said, equal the total capacity of beds the county will need. One must then factor into that need the operational efficiencies that can be obtained by housing more inmates.

"All of the studies," Magers said, "assumed that nothing changes." However, things do change, he said. In fact things have changed. The snapshots shown in the reports he mentioned, Magers said, assumed the county would continue to grow the way it had in the late 1990s and earlier part of this decade. However, that growth has not continued at the rate projected by the earlier reports.

For instance, Magers said, the Wiginton report showed the county should be at 135,000 to 145,000 people by the year 2015 to 2020. The Bogard report estimated that the county would have 130,000 to 136,000 people for the same period. Those two rates show between a 1.5 and 2 percent of increase in population, and the county is currently only averaging around a 1 percent increase in population.

Magers further pointed out a Texas Commission on Jail Standards report in November 2008 that projected the county's population to be at 140,388 and assumed a maximum incarceration rate of 3.20 people per 1000 county residents. That report, Magers said, suggests that the county would need beds for around 528 inmates.

A second Texas Commission on Jail Standards report issued in May 2009 still projects the county population at 140,388 but assumes a maximum incarceration rate of 3.35 per 1,000 county residents and suggests the need for a jail with at least 720 beds.

The 2009 estimate for the number of beds needed, Magers said, was further increased by an additional 10 percent because Grayson County is in "close proximity to the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolitan Area."

Magers said the lack of continued population growth isn't the only way the numbers quoted by the various reports miss the mark. In addition to a slowdown in growth, he said, one also has to factor in all of the things the county has done, and done well, to reduce overcrowding in the jail.

He listed among those items the addition of a full-time judge in the 397th state District Court to replace the part-time judge of the 336th, a new federal magistrate to move federal inmates, new contract district attorneys whose sole job is to move the jail population, and a new drug court. He also factored into that a reduction in the number of inmates kept on immigration warrants after Sept. 11, 2001.

Because all of the numbers readily available are inflated, Magers said, there needs to be another study that will look at what the county is dealing with now and what is likely to deal with in the future. That is the study that Magers said Jim Wiginton, of the same company that provided the 2002 report, said he can do for around $45,000. Magers said Wiginton said that best estimate he could give without really studying the issue would be that the county would need a jail that would hold around 500 inmates total and would cost between $20 to $23 million. That price, Wiginton said, does not include renovation of the existing building or project costs such as fees, furniture, land or other non-construction costs.

About a quarter of the inmates in the jail at any given time, Magers said, are there on city of Sherman charges. He said since a quarter of the inmates in the county jail come from the city of Sherman, the city should consider paying one quarter of the cost to see what it will take to keep the jail downtown.

Magers contends that losing the jail downtown will cost the city millions spent by those doing business with legal community in the area. Spending some to save that much might not be a bad option.