The jail — located in the Government Center, which was built in 1976 — will cost the city $151,000 to operate for a complete year.
Money saved in the overtime budget, salary savings from an officer’s resignation late last year and expected revenue generated from Beavercreek also housing prisoners there has put the city in a position to reopen the jail.
“We do more with less,” Barlow said. “And reopening the jail will bring the Fairborn Police Department back to normalcy.
“The impact of closing the jail has greatly hampered the way we do business,” he added. “We’ve gotten questions from citizens, employees and council to see if there was a way to get the jail opened. If you don’t have a place to incarcerate people, there’s no deterrent.”
Overtime projected savings, including pension and medicare, is $97,000 because of a yearly downward trend of overtime hours for officers since 2005, when Barlow took over as chief.
Another $26,203 is from the salary savings following Josh Knapp’s resignation, and the projected revenue from Beavercreek during the final eight months of the year is $22,225, for a total of $145,428.
Cost to operate the jail for the rest of the year is $98,646 — $81,046 for part-time jailers at $13 an hour and $17,600 for additional expenses, like laundry materials.
“This is money transferred out of the overtime budget, not additional appropriations,” Barlow said. “It’s money already in the budget. We’re just utilizing it for a different purpose.”
Barlow said there are three key reasons why it is important to reopen the jail: to have an immediate consequence for those who commit a crime within the city limits; the two Greene County jails in Xenia are full; and the time spent by Fairborn officers transporting prisoners to Xenia reduces their overall visibility in the city.
From May 2010 to August 2011, only 28 percent of arrested individuals were incarcerated for a period of time. For the 12 months before the jail’s closure, that number was 74 percent.
After the jail’s closure in 2010, prisoner transports — both to the Greene County jails and back to Fairborn Municipal Court — totaled 578 trips and 762 hours, equaling 32 days. The numbers in 2011 came out to be 729 trips totaling 817 hours (34 days).
“This helps us to retain some of the suspects that are obtained on the streets,” Fairborn City Manager Deborah McDonnell said. “And, it helps us a little bit more in deterring criminal activity in our city. I’d much rather have them patrolling our streets than driving to Xenia.
“We need to be able to keep people off the streets when it’s appropriate. It’s a significant tool for our law enforcement agencies.”
When the jail closed in May 2010, seven part-time employees were laid off and the full-time dispatch staff was reduced from 12 to its current number of 10. Fairborn has 40 full-time sworn officers.
City officials said that the passage of two new five-year, 4.4-mill police and fire/EMS levies in November were critical to keeping the current staff at full strength.
“Now that our citizens have given us an opportunity to keep our focus where it was, the chief has been able to rework some of the organizational structure where there are savings,” McDonnell said. “It’s also an opportunity to (add a) revenue stream to offset the costs of the jail.”
While Beavercreek will be the primary source of revenue, Barlow said the village of Enon, Wright State University and the Greene County Sheriff’s Office all have used the jail in the past.
The jail has two isolation cells, one cell with four beds for females and three cells with four beds each for males.
“We welcome the reopening of the jail,” Beavercreek police Chief Dennis Evers said. “It’s a process we’re familiar with and comfortable with. For us, it’s a more efficient process to take them and drop them off at the Fairborn jail than for us to go to Xenia. We’re always looking at ways to make the operation more efficient. It goes back to making sure we spend the taxpayers’ money wisely.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2281 or smatthews@coxohio.com.
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