State to renew push for a new Oahu jail

A more than 20-year state initiative to replace Oahu’s overcrowded and deplorable jail in Kalihi is being positioned for a big push forward next year.

The state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation plans to request $280 million from the Legislature in 2025, to complete planning and procurement work with $30 million and secure $250 million as a down payment for a private developer to build a roughly estimated $1.2 billion new facility in Halawa replacing Oahu Community Correctional Center.

If successful, the agency projects seeking development proposals in 2026, starting construction in 2029 and opening a new DCR-run jail in 2031.

The plan, however, may face challenges, given deep-rooted opposition to a new jail from justice system reform advocates and reluctance at times from some leaders in the Legislature despite woefully obsolete conditions at the state’s largest jail and high costs to maintain and staff the facility.

Tommy Johnson, DCR director, believes past work and achievements to date have put the agency and its growing number of consulting partners in a good position to finally proceed with redevelopment of the 982-bed jail largely built in the early 1980s, with some parts dating to 1916.

“We believe we have momentum and full support from Gov. Josh Green’s administration on the project,” Johnson said in a statement. “There is a critical need for a new jail considering parts of the current OCCC are over 110 years old. By providing a modern design facility with energy-efficient features, we can provide a living environment for those in our custody and care and a better working environment for our employees for decades to come.”

New ventures

To help retain and build support for the project, DCR in recent weeks began promoting it as the “New Oahu Jail Project” and created an informational website at newoahujail.hawaii.gov.

DCR also has expanded its project team with six new members. They include The Wilhelm Group, a Honolulu firm led by construction industry executive Lance Wilhelm to advise on public-­private partnership, or P3, arrangements; local public relations firm Pineapple Tweed; local landscape design firm Ki Concepts; and St. Louis-based design and engineering firm HOK Inc.

Other new members are Manoa-based engineering consulting firm Amel Technologies and Pacific Justice &Reconciliation Center, a nonprofit led by Kahu Kaleo Patterson.

Older members of the team are the state Department of Accounting and General Services, New York-based criminal justice consulting firm Pulitzer/Bogard &Associates, Florida-based RS Security Consulting, Canada-based P3 and engineering advisory firm WSP Global, local architectural firm AHL, local civil and traffic engineering firm Wilson Okamoto Corp. and Seattle-based cost estimator Cumming Group.

In August, team members attended workshops and panel discussions at the American Correctional Association’s 154th Congress of Correction in Nashville, Tenn., where they also shared the OCCC redevelopment plan in an exhibition booth and toured a nearby 4-year-old jail designed in part by team member HOK.

Nashville’s Downtown Detention Center includes 810 beds, a behavioral care center, a civic plaza and public garden.

The effort to develop this jail, also referred to as the Davidson County Criminal Justice Center, began in 2015 and cost $175 million, according to a local government audit.

Efforts to replace OCCC stretch back more than two decades, with roots in a 1998 state corrections master plan that recommended replacing the facility, which houses short-term inmates, including people awaiting trial or sentencing on Oahu for crimes, as well as convicted inmates with no more than two years or so left on their sentences.

Decades of trying

In 2002, then-Gov. Ben Cayetano asked lawmakers for $1.5 million to develop plans to replace OCCC, and state officials had discussions with private prison operators about possibly developing a new jail on state land.

Another effort was launched in 2013 by the predecessor of DCR, which solicited ideas and in 2014 received 10 proposals that included building a new jail in West Oahu, on the existing OCCC site and as an attachment to Halawa Correctional Facility, the state prison built in 1987 at the back of Halawa Valley.

The Legislature in 2014 appropriated $5 million for planning, and in 2016 approved $5.4 million more to continue work that included site analyses, creation of a master plan, community outreach and producing an environmental impact statement.

Some project backers at that time envisioned a new jail being produced at little taxpayer expense if a private developer was allowed to redevelop OCCC’s 16-acre Kalihi site, which is near a planned city rail station, in return for building a new jail elsewhere. Such a trade-off is not part of the current plan.

A site for a new jail was selected in 2017 at the bottom of Halawa Valley occupied by a state Department of Agriculture animal quarantine station, and the project’s development cost was estimated at $525 million.

In more recent years, replacing OCCC has run into opposition from leaders in the Legislature and a commission established by lawmakers in 2019 that built on pushback from prison reform advocacy organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaii, that believe a priority effort should be implementing ways to incarcerate fewer people.

Some of the resistance has been over the cost and size of the new facility. As currently planned, a new jail would be about 32 percent bigger than OCCC with around 1,000 detention beds, including some for detainees with acute and sub-acute mental health issues, as well as around 295 transition beds for detainees preparing to exit.

The Hawaii Correctional Systems Oversight Commission in 2020 took a position that new jail planning work should be paused, and in 2022 reiterated its position to lawmakers who had been asked by then-Gov. David Ige to appropriate $15 million to develop a detailed request for proposals, select a winning bid and negotiate a development agreement, among other things.

“This is not the jail that the people of Hawaii want or need,” Bob Merce, vice chair of a prison reform task force formed by the Legislature, told the House Finance Committee during a hearing on the state budget bill in 2022. “It’s too big, it’s too expensive and it’s been poorly planned.”

The 50-member House rejected the requested funding in 2022 in a move championed by Sylvia Luke, who chaired the House Finance Committee and is now lieutenant governor.

“We are proud to say that the Finance Committee, along with the House, did not fund the $15 million request for the construction of the new OCCC,” Luke said in a House floor speech at the time. Luke was on an overseas trip Thursday and Friday and not available for comment.

New momentum

In 2023, Green in his first year as governor used a discretionary fund to provide $4.5 million to keep planning and design work for a new jail from stalling.

DCR’s predecessor, the Department of Public Safety, also sought $25 million from lawmakers in 2023 and achieved partial success with a $10 million appropriation, which was restricted for project use after the start of the current fiscal year July 1 and has not yet been released by the governor.

In lobbying for the $25 million, Johnson told House Finance Committee members that OCCC’s age contributes to tens of millions of dollars of annual maintenance that would be eliminated with a new facility, and that a new facility also would require far fewer staff and help cut overtime costs that are running about $22 million a year because of hiring challenges and liberal use of leave policies under collective bargaining agreements.

Johnson noted that the federal detention center on Oahu can hold up to about 1,100 detainees with a staff of a little over 200 compared with OCCC requiring 435 corrections officers. The federal facility opened in 2001 near the Honolulu airport at a cost reported at the time to be $63 million, though the Legislature said it cost $170 million.

The $10 million appropriation approved in 2023 represented a compromise by House leadership, which opposed any additional funding, and Senate leadership, which endorsed DCR’s $25 million request.

DCR said the pending $10 million is needed for the planning and procurement process along with the $30 million it plans to request next year at the Legislature, which will have new House leadership.

Green, a former lawmaker, said in a statement that he is committed to working with DCR and legislative leaders to ensure that funds are made available to complete what he termed a “desperately needed project.”

Uncertainties ahead

How exactly DCR intends to fully finance construction and maintenance of a new jail remains rather uncertain at the moment.

The agency is considering variations of a P3 model where a private developer would be responsible for designing, financing, building and maintaining a new jail for DCR operation.

Under this concept, the state would wholly pay for the project but minimize the expense by using creative private market financing as opposed to state bonds, and save on long-term maintenance costs by relying on the private sector to keep up the facility more efficiently than the bureaucratic state.

“Our statewide past performance demonstrates how our reactive, unpredictable, limited funding maintenance practices have caused more costly expenditure for results that do not fully address facility needs,” DCR and DAGS said in a joint statement.

The initial $250 million DCR intends to request next year would be seed capital to leverage whatever financing mechanism is selected from among competing developer proposals.

The total cost of a new jail was estimated by DCR in 2023 at $937 million. The agency also estimates that the price will escalate by $3.5 million per month, or $252 million over six years through 2029 when DCR projects construction can start, bringing the total estimated cost to nearly $1.2 billion.

In addition to funding for a new jail, a legislative appropriation is needed for a new animal quarantine station. The cost for that is estimated at $60 million, and DCR anticipates that it would be completed in early 2029 to allow jail construction to begin later that year.

If DCR fails to get a new jail built, the agency said the alternative will be a “do nothing” approach with serious and long-lasting ill effects, including exponential cost escalations for maintenance and upgrades, workforce retention and hiring declines, and increasingly negative humanitarian impacts on occupants and staff.