During a 2021 special session, the Alabama Legislature green-lit $1.3 billion in financing to build two new 4,000-bed mega-prisons — one in Elmore County and the other in Escambia County.
At the time, the plan used a combination of a $785 million bond issue, $400 million from the CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act) and a $154 million surplus from the General Fund.
The legislature passed the plan with a proclaimed demand for urgency due to pending federal litigation. Part of that plan was an insistence on the ability to bypass the state's bid process, which could have kept the costs in check.
However, nearly five years later, the cost for the Elmore County facility's construction, which has been fraught with delays, has skyrocketed to an estimated $1.25 billion, consuming nearly all the financing meant for the original two-prison plan.
During an appearance on Mobile radio FM Talk 106.5's "The Jeff Poor Show," U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Auburn), the odds-on favorite to win Alabama's November gubernatorial election, pledged a thorough examination of the cost overruns if elected governor.
"Yeah, it is a mess," he said. "And you know, it's embarrassing how we've gotten to this point. We've already started a plan. We started about a year ago. And it takes good leadership first from that standpoint of who does it. We've talked to all the good states that really know what they're doing, their corrections system. And we've talked to Florida, we've talked to Georgia, we've talked to Tennessee, we've talked to Kansas, Missouri, Texas. There's some good, there's some bad. And then what you do is you learn from experience. So first of all, it costs a lot of money. It costs a lot of money to have prisons, but we're going to have prisons because we're not going to have the animals running the zoo. We've got to straighten it out. And it's embarrassing, you know, that documentary came out about our prison system. So we'll, that'll be one of our first things that we start doing. It's cost us a lot of money. I really don't understand."
"I've had the engineers and architects here building, that's building our, our new one down," Tuberville continued. "I think it's an Atmore. And it started out about $600-700 million. Now it's $1.2-1.3 billion because of change orders. And we will do a forensic accounting of every dime spent. So those people down there building this, you better really be careful what you're doing. Make sure you account for everything that's going on. There's no reason for a prison to cost a billion dollars—my gosh. And so we will take control of it. We're not going to just let it run on autopilot. Our corrections system will be one of the best in the country."
He added, "It's just going to take us a while to get control of it, get new leadership in and put a plan together. It's like anything else. You just don't have it. You've got to have a plan to do it. And we have got some great ideas to make it work, to make it less expensive on the taxpayers in Alabama because they don't, I don't like prisons, you don't like prisons, you don't like your tax money going there. Some of it "has to go there, but not near the mount, that's what we're spending right now. We have got to do it a better way, but we can do it a better way and do it at a lot less expense of the taxpayers' money."
Jeff Poor is the editor-in-chief of 1819 News and host of "The Jeff Poor Show," heard Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-noon on Mobile's FM Talk 106.5. To connect or comment, email [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @jeff_poor.
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