Wayne County Consolidated Jail Project
Like most major cities, Detroit has downtown courthouses – at least eight, including local, county, federal, bankruptcy, and immigration courts. The busiest are the 36th District Court and the 3rd Circuit Court, both of which are located on the same stretch of Gratiot Avenue and handle the majority of cases in the city. While most of the cases are settled with a fine or a suspended sentence, more serious charges end up across the street, in one of several high-rise jails.
The high concentration of justice-related buildings in one area is no accident, as the jails were built next to courts to make it easier to physically move inmates through the system. Wayne County operates three jails in Detroit, dividing up prisoners between two downtown locations along Gratiot and one located out in the suburbs. The setup isn’t very efficient – having multiple jails doing the same thing costs more money, contributing to overcrowding and maintenance problems.
One potential solution would be to consolidate the three separate jails into one larger facility. Wayne County started exploring this option in 2005, but high costs and uncertainty about where to put the jail put the plans on hold for a few years. By 2010 though, the condition of the existing facilities had gotten so bad that it was determined that renovating them would be more costly than starting new. AECOM, an engineering firm that had worked with the county on previous studies proposed a new facility that would replace the three jails and cut costs by up to $30 million dollars a year – a major savings for the cash-strapped county.
In September of 2011, Wayne County announced plans to build a new 2,000-bed jail, with an estimated cost of between $220 and $300 million dollars. It would be located on an empty lot along Gratiot on the edge of downtown, where the Greektown Casino had originally planned to build before deciding on its current location. The site on Gratiot Avenue had advantages: it was next to the existing jail facilities, and could connect directly to the county courthouse by underground tunnel, reducing transportation costs. But the county originally planned on building on land it had already owned, and the cost of the land - about $14 million dollars for the land, and another $6 million to clean it up – had not been included in the budget.
The jail project was fast-tracked, a process which theoretically reduces the amount of time it takes to finish a building, but requires comprehensive planning and cooperation between the owner, designer, and builder. Oversight of the project was given to the Wayne County Building Authority, a five-member board that oversees construction of county projects. But problems surfaced early on. one of the appointed members simply never showed up to any meetings. Another member retired several months into the project, and was not replaced. Further questions were raised after the board gave a $2-million-dollar contract to a former county employee to act as the owner’s on-site representative. After it became public that he had quit his county job just days before to accept the contract, he was fired, and the oversight position was left vacant.
To pay for the jail, the county issued $200 million dollars in bonds, with another $100 million available. But as early as August of 2011, it was clear that the project was going to go over budget. The firms designing and building the jail were estimating that it would cost at least $342 million dollars, $42 million over the price being stated publicly, and costs were continuing to go up. At that critical time, however, oversight had broken down almost completely. Several of the county executives who knew about the budget problems left the government or were fired, including the owner’s on-site representative, caught up in a scandal over severance packages.
The budget swelled as construction began in 2012 while the design had yet to be finalized, and changes were being made as work was already under way. When the Detroit Police Department signed on to the jail project after work had already started, plans had to be redrawn to include an inmate processing center at their request. But a short time later the department withdrew from the project, causing the plans to be redrawn yet again.
It wasn’t until January of 2013 that a new project manager was brought in to provide oversight for the county. He discovered numerous problems and budget overruns, including smoke ventilation systems not included in the design drawings and security equipment costs that had been understated by $6 million dollars. As the true cost of the project became clear, county officials began holding weekly meetings with executives from the construction companies trying, to find ways to bring the cost of the project down - even as work on the site continued.
In June, Wayne County executive Robert Ficano announced that the jail was $91 million dollars over budget, and ordered that work be suspended for 60 days to re-evaluate the project. While over half of the budgeted cost for the jail has been spent on construction, only 25% of the jail had been completed.
An audit completed in August by the Wayne County Office of Legislative Auditor General found significant flaws in how the project was structured. Investigators were unable to find documentation to support the projected annual cost savings of $20 to $30 million dollars. The lack of oversight led to $42 million dollars in changes to the jail plan that were made without the approval of the Building Authority. Much of the remaining cost was for items not in the original budget, like the $20 million dollars spent on Gratiot site.
The 60-day halt in work became an indefinite one as workers began to prepare the site for winter in October of 2013. The legal mess that followed went on for two years, with the county and the contractors suing and countersuing each other for the failure of the project. In the meantime, the partially-completed structure was costing the county over $1.4 million dollars a month in security, maintenance, and debt payments. Over 100 precast concrete jail cell units that had already been completed but not installed ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees while they sat in storage at a factory in River Rouge. One report suggested that it would be cheaper to crush the cells into gravel than to continue storing them or transport them to the work site.
Several plans for either completing the site in a reduced capacity or moving it to another location were proposed. Between the planning stages and the start of construction, downtown Detroit had experienced a revival as billionaire Dan Gilbert moved his Quicken Loans operations to the city, relocating over 10,000 jobs downtown. In October of 2013, Gilbert proposed buying the jail site and several adjacent buildings for $50 million dollars to build residential housing, a hotel, and retail. Another proposal announced in 2016 would transform the site into a $1 billion dollar mixed use development with a 24,000 seat professional soccer stadium at the center. Neither plan received much enthusiasm from the county.
Despite doubts about the viability of the partially-completed structure which had gone through three Michigan winters, Wayne County believed that finishing the downtown jail was the best option. None of the other options, including moving the project outside of downtown or turning it into a soccer stadium would cover the $175 million dollars already spent on the project. In July of 2016, the county announced that it was hiring a consulting group to organize restarting construction of the jail. A feasibility study by an engineering firm found that despite some superficial damage that would require some work, the jail was in good enough condition that it could be restarted within a year.
In the end, though, the main obstacle to restarting construction was that the county would be liable for any cost overruns. Though the plan for the soccer stadium was scrapped in 2017, the land remained a valuable piece of downtown real estate. In March of 2018, Wayne County announced that work at the Gratiot site would not resume. Instead, the jail would be rebuilt in the center of the city, with the County and Gilbert splitting the cost. Demolition on the jail began in September of 2018.
