Mid-October date set for construction of new Allen County Jail on Meyer Road

ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. (WANE) –The Allen County Commissioners Friday approved to proceed with the construction of a new $300 million, 1,500 bed jail on Meyer Road, that officials say is $18 million under budget and will be completed in November 2027.

Commissioners Richard Beck, Therese Brown and Nelson Peters have been the main characters in a bid to satisfy the orders of federal judge Damon R. Leichty who sided with inmates in a January 2020 federal filing that the existing downtown jail is inhumane, primarily due to understaffing and being chronically overcrowded.

The shovels will go in Oct. 14, a month after the Indiana Tax Court sided with the Indiana Department of Government Local Finance, that the downtown Allen County Courthouse could be used as collateral as the project unfolded. Opponents who filed a case against the jail have indicated through the local media that they will not appeal the decision.

The project will be built under a CMC, designated as Weigand Construction, according to Chris Cloud, the Commissioners’ chief of staff, which means that Weigand, one of two main large construction firms in the county, will choose subcontractors in a bidding process.

Construction will start with $24 million cash on hand that the Allen County Council set aside for the project, part of $45 million cash in a package that includes a LIT, local income tax allowed under state law. The upfront money will give the county time to arrange for bonding for the rest of the project, Cloud said.

Phases 1-4 will cost $234 million, a Weigand representative told the commissioners Friday. Tacked on is Phase 5 that will allow for a 5th pod the Allen County Sheriff has asked for in order to provide the modern jail with a medical health unit. and to ensure the continuation of the successful JCAP program, among other things, Cloud said.

The total for the five phases is about $266 million with another $30 million of soft costs that would include architectural fees that brings the total to just over $300 million, Cloud said.

Cloud indicated that other big construction projects currently in game, including the Google data center on Paulding Road and the new IU Health hospital at I-69 and Lower Huntington Road, could have been a challenging factor in construction, but during the legal challenges to a new jail, Weigand was consolidating the process and holding meetings for potential bidders. That list of subcontractors is due to be published.

“While we waited for the tax court and for the DLGF process to take place, behind the scenes our construction team at Weigand, our financing team of Baker Tilly, our bond counsel with Barnes & Thornburg, they were all still working to figure out timelines, next steps and pretty much do all the work they could do until we had a definitive answer from Tax Court and a definitive timeline,” Cloud said. “And when that happened, we were able to move as quickly as possible.”

“Every trade is involved in this project from plumbing, electrical, concrete, masonry, painters, roofers, asphalt, landscaping, every possible trade,” Cloud said. The jail cells, however, will be pre-made. The bidding process held at Citizens Square threw open a wide net to smaller contractors. Weigand is only allowed to bid on about 20% of the projects.

The county was able “to break into smaller products and offer the work to more local companies,” Cloud said.

Although the design was carried out by Elevatus Architecture, Cloud said Allen County sheriffs David Gladieux and current sheriff, Troy Hershberger had a say in what was needed.

“The sheriff really played a larger hand,” Cloud said. “The jail commander, the people who work in the jail, confinement officers and others played a large role in planning the physical layout and locations.” It was very important to the sheriff’s team “to have a part of the jail able to accommodate mental health. It is not a mental health hospital that you find in the private sector, but it is an area that is more geared toward addressing mental health issues.”

The mental health wing could be a “step down facility,” that would go from an individual room to more of a dorm style to a larger “almost family unit” before inmates would be released to the general population, Cloud said.

Another feature will be “an enhanced medical wing. It can be very difficult to take an inmate to an outside doctor’s appointment or hospital for a procedure or basic care, so having that in house in a greater capacity than they have now will prevent confinement officers from having to do escort to a health care facility. They’d like to do that more on site where it’s more convenient and efficient for everybody,” Cloud said.

Bonding for the construction should be completed in eight to 10 weeks, but the preliminary documents are in place, Cloud said. He estimated the bonds would be sold in $5 million increments and attractive to banks, institutional investors and insurance companies willing to hang on to an investment for 20 years. An underwriter will be in charge of selling the bonds.

Behind the scenes work pushed the project ahead and helped save costs, Cloud reiterated.

“We needed to capture bids before these other large projects we knew that were right behind us came online,” Cloud said. “We did not want to compete with these other large projects like Google and IU Health in our bidding process. We would be competing for a lot of the same labor. From a sequence process, we wanted to make sure we were first in that process.

“Bidders were very gracious to extend their bids. Nobody pulled their bids and we were able to retain that $18 million savings.”

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