Sheriff calls renovation plan for Fulton jail short-sighted, says new jail is needed

Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat says the plan to renovate the Rice Street Jail instead of building a new facility is short-sighted.

“This project is really putting a band-aid on open-heart surgery,” he said at a Friday news conference.

On Thursday, Fulton County commissioners voted 4-3 to spend up to $300 million on renovations for the 35-year-old facility.

The cost of fully rebuilding the jail would be $1.7 billion. But Labat said in the long run, it’s more expensive to keep the current jail because it will need continuous repairs.

“We are going to spend over $1 billion or $2 billion over the course of three to 10 years having to continually refurbish this facility,” he said.

He calls the jail obsolete and dangerous. He said inmates are using pieces of the crumbling jail to fashion homemade weapons. More than 4,000 have been confiscated in the last two years.

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The jail has had 10 stabbings since June 1, the sheriff said.

“The infrastructure is out of date, the materials that were used are no longer used,” he said, pointing out that technology and building methods for jails have changed in the last three decades.

Several inmates have died in the jail just this year.

He said commissioners are not taking the long-range view by simply approving renovations for the facility.

“It does not take into account the growth of the county. It does not take into the rise in crime as a whole,” he said.

In an interview Thursday, Fulton County Commission chair Robb Pitts said a new jail is unnecessary and too costly. The planned renovations would create a “first-class facility.”

“I mean, it made no sense at any point in time to spend two billion dollars of taxpayers’ money to build a new jail,” he said.

A new jail could have been paid for with a new sales tax, but state lawmakers rejected that idea. The only other option was to increase property taxes, something commissioners weren’t willing to do.

“We have to take a broader look at where we need to be in 30 years,” Labat said.

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