Buena Vista jail/sheriff's office offers space, security

Eddy, who will be 62 this year, said the time is right to turn in his badge - and retire. He will do so on Dec. 31, almost exactly 20 years to the day he started work as the county sheriff on Jan. 1, 1989. His law enforcement experience includes another 13 years as a Storm Lake police officer.

So with that long record as a sheriiff operating in an overcrowded basement headquarters/jail in the basement of the county courthouse, he knew just what he wanted when the jail was moved a mile east last September to a new free-standing facility at 411 Expansion Road. And the architects welcomed his input, he noted.

He wanted space and security. And Eddy got plenty of both.

The space is especially nice.

The sheriff's office alone is about one and a half times the space he had in the old courthouse basement. The old jail facility is now being used for storage purposes by other courthouse departments.

"Our civil area out there where you came in - that total area out there is about the size of what we had for 17 people down underneath the courthouse," he said. "Everybody's just happy to be out here. It's a great improvement over what we were in. Just the extra space and everything that we have, and the interview rooms and everything else that were added on that we didn't have."

There's more space for the inmates, too. The old jail was a rated 18-bed facility. The new jail can accommodate 48 prisoners, and Eddy noted that the jail as designed could easily be expanded to 75 beds, if needed. The population is down a little bit. "We've been running right around 15 to 20," he said. "It fluctuates."

In addition to the sheriff's office and the jail, the county communications center and emergency management agency are located in the new building, a $5.3 million project that Eddy has been eyeing since the late 1990s, he said. Voters approved a second, successful $4.8 million bond issue to pay for the new building in November 2005.

When asked how long it took to make the move from downtown, Eddy laughed. "Well, we're still in the process," he said last month. "There's still stuff in the basement over there that we have to get out so they can use it. The com center came out here also. So there's some of that equipment and stuff that we got new that is still down there that we have to get out so that they (the courthouse employees) can use it. I think they're going to use it for a break room or something."

There was no need to upgrade the department's computer equipment, however. Most of the computers were fairly new, he noted. "All we had to do was kind of plug them in, and then everything was still running," Eddy said.

The sheriff and then-jail administrator Don McClure sat down with the architect to discuss their needs, and they managed to get most of what they wanted. They wanted the main control and booking room connected, and they are just across the hall from each other. But that was a minor matter, he said.

"Our main concern was our staffing. We didn't want to have to hire a whole lot of more new people," he said, and that has worked out. "We hired a few part-time people extra. But other than that, we're running with the same amount of staff that we were at the old jail."

Security is considerably better in the new facility. The old jail had a linear style, with the jailers having to walk back and forth in front of the inmates. And anytime an inmate had to be moved, a jailer had to go into the cell to get them moved, the sheriff said.

"Here, they don't have to do that. They can get them out of the cell and watch them walk around because of the way it's designed. So it's a lot more secure and safer for the jailers," he said.

A jailer monitoring activities from the video-friendly main control room can lock and unlock all the doors in the building.

The Buena Vista County Jail design is more of a radial design where cells surround an operations center, allowing staffers to physically see inside each cellblock. And the prisoners are housed in units segregated according to sex, age and crime. There is a minimum security area, one for maximum security inmates, a section for female prisoners and a "special status" area for juvenile offenders.

"We've saved about $35,000 on juvenile costs just by being able to house them here rather than having to take them somewhere else, like over to the Youth Emergency Services Center at Cherokee," Eddy said.

A multipurpose area which can be used for church services, AA meetings or mental health visits will eventually be available for use as a video courtroom, the sheriff said. "We have a video system between here and the courthouse," he said. "So they can roll it out. It's a TV monitor, camera and everything that they can set here, and the magistrate can have the initial hearings from the courthouse and not even have to take the inmate out of the facility," he said.

A similar setup enables visitors to meet with prisoners in a video visitation room near the civil area at the building's entrance. The prisoners are in a comparable room back in the jail area. The inmates and visitors see each other on a video screen and talk into a phone, with no direct contact between the two, Eddy said. The inmates have no contact visits other than with attorneys, clergy or medical personnel.

Since inmates are housed in the jail for no more than a year, there is no need for personal contact, Eddy said.

During his two-decade county law enforcement career, the sheriff said he has only seen one prisoner spent an entire year in the county jail. The inmate chose the jail over state prison even though he could have probably gotten an early release from the state facility. As a jail inmate, he didn't have that option.

The jail was under construction for about a year.

The 12-inch thick outside walls and 6-inch-thick interior walls were all precast.

It is the kind of security the sheriff finds comforting. The evidence room is larger and more secure. Ditto the armory.

Back in the courthouse, all of the weapons were stored in a little room directly underneath the county assessor's office. "So had it exploded, the assessor would have went also." he said, chuckling. "It's a lot more secure, a lot safer for everybody. And again, there's more room for storage."

Meals on Wheels

The kitchen in the new Buena Vista County jail building does a fine job of feeding the jail's staffers and inmates, but it also breaks out into the Storm Lake community on a regular basis.

Sheriff Chuck Eddy said the new jail kitchen also serves up the Meals on Wheels for the community. a service that used to be provided by the Buena Vista Regional Medical Center. When the hospital underwent some remodeling last year and needed the meals program moved elsewhere, the Sioux Falls company that contracted to prepare meals in the new state-of-the-art county kitchen agreed to take over the cooking for the Meals on Wheels program, Eddy said. He simply asked if they were interested.

"They're doing it, and just using our equipment," he said.