TIPTON – Over the past several months, the Tipton County Jail Feasibility Study Committee weighed whether to make repairs to the county's existing jail facilities or build a new one altogether.
The committee released its findings late last week, and the message was clear: the county needs a new jail.
“The current jail is obsolete and not functional, and does not comply with state and federal regulations,” the committee said in its statement to local officials. “We recommend that the Tipton City Police Department and the Tipton County Sheriff’s Dept. be housed in one location. The name of the new facility should be The Tipton County Justice Facility.”
The official final report from the committee will be filed in the coming weeks. It will include comprehensive conclusions and give various local government agencies a better base for how to move forward.
Once that’s done, the county commissioners will begin the process of deciding how to proceed.
“Do we want to move forward with a smaller committee, or a building committee or something like that?” commissioner Joe Vanbibber said. “I think that would be the logical thing.
“It also gives [county councilman] Jim Powell, who was on the finance committee, and anyone else from the county council, a direction on funding,” Vanbibber continued. “The other thing I think it does is it lets the commissioners and the abbreviated committee decide what kind of form we want this project to take. I think Tipton County needs to own this project, not an outside company. County officials are going to make these official decisions [on who to hire for the project], and I think they need to be held accountable. I think you do that by the mechanism that they build this thing for us, and we’re not working for an architectural firm or some large company.”
The exact location has not yet been chosen, but eight potential sites have been identified. The actual location will depend on cost and size, commissioners said.
“Like everyone else that I have talked to that was involved in the jail open houses, which were very well attended and open to the public, nobody walked out of that building thinking it was a good facility,” Vanbibber said. “I think even to that, everyone was shocked by the aging of it and the condition it’s in.”
The study committee also recommended a 60- to 75-bed jail with offices for both the sheriff’s and city police departments. It also recommended the current jail house and sheriff’s residence be preserved as a historic structure for the community. The sheriff's residence is one of the oldest standing buildings in Tipton County. Completed in 1895, it was placed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1984.
“That committee that looked at the old jail included people from the historical society,” Vanbibber said. “They went out and aggressively got a grant to do a study on it. I think it’s clear that if there’s any way there can be some sort of collaboration between the county, city and historical society, they could occupy that building. That’s the avenue we’d like to go.”