Oklahoma County could build its new jail in stages or, depending how things go, construct the entire project at once. But either way, as 2025 closes and a new year begins, county officials are bracing for a potentially make-or-break phase in an ongoing effort that has seen massive cost increases and growing public skepticism.
Just over three years have passed since Oklahoma County voters approved a $260 million bond package to fund construction of a new county jail. But for those involved in the project, regardless of whether they support or oppose it, the intervening time after that election has had all the characteristics of an extremely long headache.
Since those heady days in mid-2022, the cost of the new jail has exploded from around $400 million to more than $700 million, and possibly higher depending when construction begins.
Oklahoma County doesn’t have that kind of money. Not yet, anyway.
The future of the project could be determined in April, or possibly, in the fall, when county commissioners are expected to ask residents to approve a first-of-its-kind sales tax for Oklahoma County. In an ideal world, the new sales tax would bridge the funding gap for the jail’s initial construction and provide ongoing money for safer operations.
“We are going to pay for this,” District 3 Commissioner Myles Davidson said in early December. “It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of how. Are we going to have the largest property tax increase in Oklahoma history? Or are we going to do a sales tax where at least 50 percent of the people passing through here help us pay for it? And if the citizens don’t want a sales tax, then they don’t want it. That’s fine. But I feel like we owe it to them to at least give them that option.”
New jail could be built in stages
Under plans approved long ago, the new jail complex will be paired with a behavioral health center that would divert detainees who face mental health problems out of the jail’s general population. Construction on the $40 million behavioral health wing is underway, funded by ARPA funds.
While that project is moving forward as intended, the jail remains in flux, mostly owing to funding issues and the ever-complicated political dynamics of the OKC metro. There has been some site work at the new jail site, but nothing in the way of brick and mortar.
Meanwhile, the project’s total cost has climbed from $400 million to $725 million, according to Flintco’s Mike Atkinson, who spoke at a Nov. 25 meeting of the Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee.
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“The first phase would come up to around $206 million, and we feel like we could do this first phase,” Atkinson told committee members. “If the budget is $214 million, everything should fit into that. That’s something we could get started on in March. And the thought was that if the funds were not approved in April, we could still build Phase 1. It would still be operational and could survive a couple of years very easily until other funds were provided. A better scenario would be if the tax were passed in April or the fall, the idea would be that we could move forward with the whole project.”
In his Nov. 25 update, Atkinson reminded members that, as of June, the budget had been set at $698 million for the entire project. Now, however, he said the cost of the entire project would be about $725 million.
The rising costs have irritated Mark Faulk, a longtime critic of how the current jail operates and of the county’s plans for a new one. Faulk, who announced his bid for the Oklahoma County District 1 commissioner’s seat in December, told jail trust members Dec. 8 that the project is floundering amid rising costs.
“How did we triple the budget of the jail?” Faulk asked, addressing Davidson. “Because the original budget was a sham. You knew that we couldn’t build a jail for $260 million. That was the amount of the retiring bonds. We’re trying to blame it on the prices of concrete and steel, which have not gone up 300 percent. Non-residential building is up 40 percent. So we should be looking at around a $400 million jail, even with inflation from three years. But we’ve tripled the budget, and it will continue to go up. This is just insanity. It’s turned into a huge, ugly, deadly farce.”
If all of the money needed to complete the project cannot be raised at once through a sales tax, the county is considering building the jail in phases. HOK director of architecture Curt Parde told Citizens’ Bond Oversight Committee members Nov. 25 that the first phase would include electrical, water, sewer and drainage work, as well as the construction of a road encircling the structure to allow for fire department access in the event of an emergency.
It would also include a booking and intake area, food service infrastructure and a warehouse to store supplies, such as detainee clothing, shoes and other essentials.
The second phase would include all detainee housing, administrative offices and a medical center, which Parde said would be the most substantial piece of the project.
Phased approach to jail construction creates logistical problems
If the two phases don’t happen at once, that could mean those arrested would be transported to the new facility at 1901 E. Grand Blvd. for booking before being bused downtown to the current jail, where they would be housed.
The logistics of such a plan would be complicated and would require food to be transported daily from the new facility to the downtown jail, where detainees are actually housed.
District 1 Commissioner Jason Lowe said that idea could create problems.
“My concern is that we have two sites,” Lowe said in early December. “We have a jail that we’ve just invested $260 million in, but we need about $600 million more to actually build it, and we can’t fund the current jail adequately. So we’re going to have two sites. We’re going to have to fund the additional site, and right now, we can’t fund the current site. Now we’re going to build half a jail that we’re also going to have to fund.”
Lowe said the cost of not getting a sales tax passed could be catastrophic for the county, which he noted is obligated to fund operational costs of the behavioral care center as well.
“Just imagine if this vote were to fail. We would be in a horrible situation,” Lowe said. “I’m talking about projects being stalled. Layoffs. It’s just a bad situation that we have two additional things that cost us that we didn’t have before. So that’s what keeps me up at night.”
Davidson said the new jail proposal was never intended to cost only $260 million. He was not a commissioner at the time of the June 2022 bond election, but he was running for office and had worked in county government for a decade.
“I think the citizens of Oklahoma County understand the situation we’re put in,” Davidson said. “I think I spoke clearly in my editorial that I don’t believe commissioners ever intended for the jail to be $260 million. They knew from the beginning that it wouldn’t, and they didn’t have a plan. They didn’t have an engineering plan to show what we’re going to build. They didn’t have any of that. They knew that ($260 million) was what was rolling off (the property tax books). They knew that they could get that at the time (without increasing taxes). They knew they could get that immediately, and if they didn’t, it would be very difficult to do. So I think they had the exact same idea of doing a sales tax on top of the $260 million they initially asked for.”
At the time, however, then-District 3 Commissioner Kevin Calvey was running for district attorney. Similarly, then-District 1 Commissioner Carrie Blumert was running for reelection, which she narrowly won by after a tight Democratic runoff that she won by 121 votes over Anastasia Pittman in August 2022. As a result, deep discussions promoting new taxes were not popular among the Board of Commissioners.
This year, both Davidson and Lowe are seeking reelection, while District 2 Commissioner Brian Maughan is not.
Contrary to Davidson, Maughan said he believed the new jail would cost far less than the current price tag when the 2022 bond passed.
“I think that’s something people jump on right away,” Maughan said. “Well, they told us it was this, and now it’s that. I really thought it was going to be around a $316 million facility. I knew that $260 million wasn’t going to be enough, but I thought that ARPA funds for the mental health facility would get us another $40 million. There were some possibilities of getting funds from our public building authority, and I also believed that some of the opioid settlement funds could be used, not that they would amount to a whole lot, but those were sources that could have gotten us to $316 million. But I believed at the time we passed the bond in 2022 that we could at least build a 1,600-bed facility. Now, with the population going up, I think it needs to be at least 1,800 beds at this point.”
Faulk, meanwhile, has pushed for a smaller jail.
“You should all be advocating for a smaller facility,” Faulk told the jail trust in December. “We don’t need 2,400 beds or whatever it will be.”
That is unlikely. As of now, plans call for a jail with about 2,200 beds. The current jail population averages around 1,600.
“Now we’re looking at about 2,000 or possibly 1,800 (beds), but I think we’re still going to end up around 2,200,” Davidson said. “Using ARPA funds for the construction of the behavioral health center to the tune of $45 million, that’s a huge savings as well. But I don’t think there are savings that we can make on the construction because, if we cut stuff today, there will only be higher costs tomorrow. People like to compare the jail of 1991 that was built, and they say, ‘Hey, that only cost $50 million. Why is this one $750 million? Well, in 1991, I could also buy a car for $2,500. I’m not doing that today.”
Altering the jail’s design for a lower bed count likely would not help much, Maughan argued.
“I mean, if we don’t get the money, we’re not going to be able to go into debt, so it’ll have to be built to budget,” he said. “I’m hopeful that we can get the funding so that we can at least build a 1,800-bed facility. The jail population went up to 1,700 at times this year, so I think that affirms our need for at least that capacity.”
But Lowe said he believes the jail’s bed count should be under 2,000.
“Right now we’ve seen proposals for a 2,600-cell facility, which I am totally against,” he said. “If we were to build a new facility, I would suggest an 1,800-bed facility. Our purpose here is to get people in and out of jail — non-violent offenders — as quickly as possible. It’s not to house individuals who are homeless or experiencing a mental health crisis. That’s not the jail’s purpose.”
Maughan: ‘The choices were bad and worse’
As the longest-serving member of the Oklahoma County Board of Commissioners, Maughan is also concerned about the pace of the project. He said the county’s fight with the City of OKC over the 1901 N. Grand Blvd. site caused some delays during the project’s design phase. Throughout 2024, the City of OKC maintained it could deny zoning approval for the site, but Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond signaled the city was likely to lose that sovereignty fight in court if it went that far. As Drummond released a formal opinion on the matter, OKC relented.
“The choices were bad and worse,” Maughan said of the lengthy site-selection process. “I don’t envy the position we’re in, but these were issues that were bigger than me and certainly even bigger than Oklahoma County. How we got here delayed us because of the fight we had to go through with OKC, which cost us a lot, not only in terms of time, but it also cost us because inflation went up dramatically in that period. Had we not had that brawl with Oklahoma City, we would be well underway by now.”
In the coming years, Maughan said the City of OKC’s new sales-tax-funded, $1 billion arena — as well as school district projects and turnpike expansion in central Oklahoma — will likely strain the available pool of skilled labor, creating further cost increases for the new jail and other projects.
“My concern is if we don’t get started, then the arena goes ahead of us, and the turnpike expansions get ahead of us,” Maughan said. “Many of the same people that we would utilize for one aspect or another of this project will be enlisted in those projects. There are only so many skilled workers in our metro area. So, that drives up the cost even further with inflation. You have to start recruiting talent from outside the state, and then of course you have to host them while they’re here, and that is very expensive compared to hiring a local contractor.”
