Cabarrus Cheap Seats

Last Saturday, when I was gathering together information for last week’s post on Harold Smith’s baseless accusations - Harold sent out this about the jail:

October 28, 2005
Commissioners Juba and Carruth make false promise to the citizens at neighborhood meeting today…

Citizens filled the Cabarrus Government Center today from 1 to 3 PM asking the Commissioners to reconsider the location of the two planned housing units for the new jail. These two planned housing units are the size of two football fields and are planned to be built at Union Street and Corban. The two planned housing units will house over a 1000 prisoners. The citizens complained that they did not know the enormous size of the total project.

The citizens encouraged going forward with the annex jail and the justice center as planned, but begged the commissioners to reconsider locating the two housing units to a more remote location. Commissioners Privette, Freeman, Juba and Carruth made a promise to reconsider the location of the two planned housing units. Commissioner Carpenter was not present during the neighborhood meeting.

Immediately following the neighborhood meeting, the commissioners called their meeting to order with Commissioner Capenter present. Commissioner Privette made a motion to form a subcommittee to reconsider the location of the two planned housing units. The motion was seconded by Commissioner Freeman. The motion was defeated with Commissioners Carpenter, Juba and Carruth voting against reconsidering the location of the two planned housing units.

Oh, by the way, Commissioner Juba apologized to Turner Construction staff who were present at both meetings for any discussions of delaying the construction of the new jail.

Why is Commissioner Juba more concerned about Turner Construction than keeping her promise made to the citizens only an hour before?

This is another sign that Cabarrus County has a leadership crisis!

Harold Smith

Sometimes, what you don’t say speaks loudest

Here’s a couple of facts Harold failed to mention:

• The County Commissioners had considered alternate jail locations in the past; but several groups, Historic Concord among them, pushed to keep the jail downtown.
• The County Commissioners did consider in that meeting to move the jail location, and they also discussed it at that same meeting. However, Coy Privette wanted to stop the entire process, form a committee to re-reconsider the jail location; but not to move it from Downtown Concord. A skeptical individual might think he wanted this decision-making process going on while he was running for another term next year.
• Most importantly, this project will be built in phases. If the County makes the construction dates, the 96 bed annex will be completed by the end of next year and the 400 bed housing factility will be finished by the end of 2007. What about the other 500 beds…that will be completed betweeen 2030 and 2035. You see, the BOC was sequestering the LAND for the second housing facility - not approving it’s construction. Harold would have you believe that they are building the whole thing right away. This is an idea known as “planning ahead”…a concept foreign to Harold Smith, Coy Privette and others of their ilk.

Leadership Crisis?

Was there a leadership crisis in the planning and building of this jail? I’ll concede the point to Harold Smith. The current state of the jail project is a product of poor leadership by the Cabarrus County Board of Commissioners - just not the current leadership. The need for a new jail was established in 1999. However, it won’t be until next year, 7 years later, that ground will break on a much-needed annex. To illustrate this point, under previous leadership, it took the Board of Commissioners two years just to STUDY a problem that they knew about two years earlier. As they dithered about this, the problem grew worse.

Right now, the current BOC must expand jail capacity in Cabarrus County. They have pressure from their own law enforcement and from the State to do so. This will force them to make some hard decisions - which they are doing. Even under all of this pressure, they are still engaging the community.

The question the voters of Cabarrus County should be asking is, why did the BOC take so long to address this need? Under the previous leadership, was public safety not a proirity? If it was, then why did this take so long?

In this case, Harold seems to be asking the right questions. He’s just not bothering to deal with all of the facts.