From the Arkansas Advocate:
A co-chair of the Legislature’s Joint Performance Review Committee said the panel will hold a hearing to allow the public to speak on the proposed Franklin County prison, in response to a request for an investigation into the site selection.
However, Rep. Bruce Cozart, R-Hot Springs, said he and his fellow co-chair Sen. Terry Rice, R-Waldron, had ruled out actually conducting an investigation.
The plans for the still-unscheduled hearing come after more than 1,200 people signed an online petition in support of an investigation.
“We do not do investigations. That would have to be the AG [Attorney General] or somebody like that,” Cozart said. “We’ll let them come in and talk as long as they stay in the parameters, don’t get too far out. We’ll hear what they’ve got to say.”
The petition says the “highly secretive” prison project “threatens to upend the lives of no less that 605 Arkansan families” living near the site, and “represents government overreach at the highest levels and pays no respect to either local control or the most basic levels of human respect.”
The request, dated July 23, asked the committee to investigate the process for selecting the Franklin County site. Opponents of the prison argue the 815-acre site near Charleston is unable to support the 3,000-bed prison envisioned by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
The governor announced the prison site late last year, taking the local community, elected officials and members of the state Board of Corrections by surprise.
The lack of engagement from state officials prior to and after the site selection has frustrated locals. The nearby town of Ozark passed a resolution in February opposing the prison, noting that it would “put a great and severe strain” on the city’s budget, as well as its infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Board of Corrections member Lee Watson last month wrote to legislators that while he was “acutely aware” of the state’s need for a new prison, he’s seen no evidence that such a large facility is needed to alleviate overcrowding.
The prison divided Republicans in the Senate during this year’s legislative session; a group of senators blocked a $750 million appropriations bill for the prison’s construction five times. The bill died on the Senate floor when the Legislature adjourned in May.
“We kept hearing that, you know, President Pro Tem [Bart Hester] didn’t want to do hearings before session started, because there’d be ample opportunity to investigate and ask questions and testify during session. And that didn’t happen,” said Adam Watson, one of the petition drafters and an outspoken critic of the prison. “We were shut out of every conversation, of every vote. … Joint Budget refused to take comments before they voted.”
When told by the Advocate that Cozart said the Joint Performance Review Committee would have a hearing, but wouldn’t investigate, Watson expressed both frustration and gratitude.
“I’m still trying to walk a fine line of being appreciative for the opportunity to speak with them — I think that that’s super helpful — but I’m disappointed that they’re saying that they’re, for whatever reason, not able to go further than that,” Watson said. He said it was a step in the right direction after not being heard at all.
He pointed out that the description of the committee on the Bureau of Legislative Research’s site explicitly says it can conduct investigations.
“I would think this is within their scope,” he said.
“This committee makes random and periodic performance reviews of specific governmental programs and agencies” and “conducts investigations into specific problem areas of the administration of state government as may be brought to the attention of the committee,” the website says.
The website also says the committee “serves as a forum for citizens to air their complaints and suggestions regarding the operation of state government” and that it “conducts hearings on citizen complaints and views regarding the operation of state government.”
The petition asks the committee to investigate:
- The prison site selection process
- Whether any standards, rules or best practices were ignored when selecting the site
- Whether any legal or ethical guidelines were violated during the selection processes for the contractors working the project
- Whether the state is or was violating state spending laws by starting work on the prison project “without sufficient funding”
The request criticizes Department of Corrections staff for allowing “inexperienced state employees” to lead the site selection process instead of relying on Vanir Construction Management’s “expert analysis.”
“As a result, critical due diligence was skipped, key infrastructure and environmental concerns were overlooked, and a deeply flawed site was chosen,” according to the petition, driving up projected costs by “hundreds of millions of dollars.”
In a March letter to the corrections department, Vanir estimated the preliminary cost of a 3,000-bed prison at $825 million, but similarly sized prisons in other states have exceeded $1 billion.
