Klickitat County Commissioners met yesterday. One of the items on the agenda that drew great interest was a discussion by Jose Briones, Chief Jail Administrator of Island County, who’s been hired by the insurance risk pool to make a thorough examination of the Klickitat County jail system. His formal report with his conclusions and observations will not be complete for another month, but he did have some early advice about the disadvantage of contracting for jail services with NORCOR:
“You will still be required to have some form of temporary holding facility and then have a transport division to move people back and forth, which means you’re still gonna have food, contract the food people. You’re still gonna have to have a medical contract to manage medical. And so really, it comes down to: do we wanna invest the money in our own facility, and keep our people here and manage them the way we wanna manage them? Or do we wanna farm it out? And still, you know, pay additional funds to do that?”
The likelihood of such a contract with NORCOR isn’t being talked about anymore at County Commission meetings, and it’s likely that the assessment of the situation by this respected expert will close out that concept.
HR Director Robb Van Cleave outlined a few of the things that will be transferred from the Sheriff’s Office to the new Department of Corrections once everything is in place:
“All the equipment that’s used in the operation of the jail, all programs administered at the jail by the county sheriff, all jail records, forms and documents in possession of the jail, budget authority for facility staff, i.e. the org chart, will be included in the final budget resolution.
Commissioners also heard a bit of a head’s-up from Finance Officer Jenn Neil:
“If the Sheriff’s Department continues to spend as they’ve spent in the first six months, they will run out of budget by November, with five months remaining on budget, with a possible need of $590,000.”
And at least one rumor was laid to rest at yesterday’s meeting. One person commented they’d heard that the 51,000 acre Big Horn Fire in eastern Klickitat County had been started by a wind turbine. Emergency Services manager Jeff King said that wasn’t the case at all.
“Sheriff’s Office, Fire Command, incident management team, the local fire chief – there are no indications that this was a human caused, or industrial caused fire. All the information they have at this point is that it was caused by that lightning strike.”