Cabarrus Cheap Seats

On Friday, a Superior Court judge upheld the construction permit for the expansion of the Cabarrus County Jail supporting the motion made by Coy Privette on June 14, 2004 to build the Cabarrus County Jail.

This may shock some folks; but Coy supported the jail - before he found himself in the minority and figured he could score some votes in the 2006 Primary.

Thankfully, for the County, facts trump politics in courts of law (for now). Without failure, jail opponents showed how they were disconnected from the process from the word “go”. Here’s a quote from the Observer article:

Ruth Hopper of Citizens for a Better Concord, a residents group opposed to the jail plan, said the weight of the evidence was with the opponents. 

“The process by which this project was introduced has been flawed from the start,” Hopper wrote in an e-mail to the Observer. She said the jail expansion started as a small annex that “has mushroomed into an enormous facility.”

The report offered to the Board of Commissioners at the October 13, 2001 meeting cited that the jail at that time was at capacity and that a new facility was needed. The report called for a facility of 364 beds with 150,000 square feet to meet the needs over the next 20 years…that was in 2001. Discussions on “stop-gap” measures only came up at the February 16, 2004 meeting and a 96-bed annex was agreed to at the May 23, 2005 meeting. The jail project existed before the annex project by a matter of years.

A matter that should have been acted on 5 years ago is very close to being put to rest regardless of the fiction being spread by the project’s opposition - or the candidates that want their votes.