_{Thumbnail photo: Ken Lund via Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons License}

Lead paint on bunks at the Curry County Jail prompted commissioners to temporarily reduce the facility’s capacity, cutting its number of beds from 35 to 16.

The Curry County Sheriff’s Office will be more judicious about who they accept into the jail as a result, according to Lt. Jeremy Krohn. But it’s the less drastic of two options he presented to commissioners at an emergency meeting on Friday. The alternative was to completely evacuate the jail, he said.

Some staff have already been relocated, Krohn said.

“As we’ve all discussed, if we close the jail it would never reopen even under an emergency like this,” he said. “We have to bring everything up to code [and] we can’t afford it. That’s why the sheriff and I came up with this plan.”

The sheriff’s office is borrowing bunk beds from Josephine County, Krohn told commissioners. 

In addition to agreeing to reduce the jail’s capacity, the Board also unanimously approved a $70,000 increase to the capital improvement project fund for the jail in order to purchase new bunk beds.

Krohn said it could take as little as six to eight weeks and up to four to six months for the new beds to arrive in Curry County. Curry County may have to compete against Jackson and Deschutes counties who have also placed orders from the same company, he said.

Krohn said he also used a grant from the county’s insurer to purchase two new beds, which have been installed.

The jail will eventually have a total of 38 beds when the emergency is over, Director of Operations Ted Fitzgerald told commissioners. He said the $70,000 can come from an interdepartmental loan transfer.

The new beds will be made of a non-metal material “some kind of plastic and composites and things like that,” Fitzgerald said following the meeting.

“The other nice thing about those is they’re a lot safer. They’re less of a suicide hazard, that sort of thing,” he told Redwood Voice Community News. “We’ve looked at various options of rehabbing the ones we had and I thought, if we’re going to do it we ought to just do it right and get something that’s state of the art.”

Fitzgerald said the lead paint was only found on the bunk beds.

“They tested the whole area,” he said, referring to an inspector the county had hired. “The only positive test was on the beds so that’s why we’re addressing that.”

Curry County is currently seeking federal appropriations dollars to rehabilitate its jail. However because lead paint poses a safety risk, the county moved forward on the project rather than wait to find out if they’re awarded those Congressionally directed spending moneys, Fitzgerald said. 

He added that Curry County will host representatives from U.S. senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley’s offices later this month.

“We’re hoping to take them into the jail and make them aware of all this,” Fitzgerald said.

At a joint meeting of the Curry County and Coos County boards of commissioners in December, Curry County Sheriff John Ward said the jail doesn’t meet state standards.

“If we close that down it’ll never reopen,” he said. “And, unfortunately, if we start going in and trying to gut it out and remodel everything, we’d have to bring it up to state standards and it would be millions of dollars. There’s no way to do that at this point.”

On Friday, Krohn said the age of the facility was to blame for lead paint being found on the bunks. One option was to use a sand blaster to try to remedy the situation, but, he noted, the jail’s ventilation system is connected to the dispatch and patrol areas of the sheriff’s office. Abating the problem on site would result in the need to evacuate the jail, Krohn said.

“The other option was to compartmentalize it and remove the affected materials out of the building and handle it off site,” he said. “In doing that, we’d have to reduce the jail capacity on a temporary emergency basis — from 35 beds to 16 beds — and during that time period, we would be limiting our transport intakes from around the state. Kind of like COVID.”

The proposal to reduce the number of beds at the jail to 16 prompted Commissioner Brad Alcorn, a former police officer, to ask how the sheriff’s office would figure out who should stay in custody and who should be released early.

Krohn referred to Oregon Senate Bill 48, which sets a criteria for inmates to be released before their trial. He said jail staff would also consider the length of an inmate’s sentence, how severe their crime was and their criminal history as well as whether they’re on parole or probation.

If someone is booked into the jail that is more a risk to public safety than an inmate who is already in custody, Krohn said the jail would release the in-custody individual for the new inmate.

Alcorn also referred to a topic that was discussed between the Coos and Curry Boards in December — whether Curry County should transport inmates to Coos County.

The Curry County Sheriff’s Office did ask Coos County officials if they could house some of their jail inmates temporarily, but they declined, Krohn said.

“Coos County has the same issues that we have with staffing and jail capacity,” he said. “They have more beds, but we would have to staff [them] in their jail if we took inmates up there and we’re already short-staffed at the jail.”

Josephine County is experiencing the same situation, Krohn said. They’re also currently undergoing a jail inspection and laying off staff.

“Josephine County did offer up the temporary bunks that we’re going to go pick up so we can house people in our facility still,” he said.

Alcorn said he and his colleagues should research all funding opportunities available for rehabilitating the Curry County Jail. He also warned that with warm weather on the horizon, law enforcement agencies within the county, including Oregon State Police, will be making more arrests.

“What I would hate to see is that we’re using a criteria to release those in-custodies and we get a series of violent criminals in there,” Alcorn said. “We might be releasing some pretty serious people back into the community, and I want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to make sure we’re not doing that.”