CALDWELL — Additional costs, a new site location and prolonged negotiations are among the factors that have caused the planned women’s jail facility in Canyon County to take sharp turns this year.
As Canyon County’s population has risen over the past two decades, so too has the number of inmates inside its jail facilities, causing consistent overcrowding issues including combining inmates with different crime levels into the same pods, reopening outdated cells, adding additional bunks in unfitted spaces and sometimes having inmates sleep on concrete floors.
Last August, Canyon County set aside $7.5 million to build a new 192-bed jail facility at a location it had been trying to develop for nearly two decades on Pond Lane after four failed bond attempts. Its board of commissioners, however, said in a joint meeting that the city of Caldwell had reached out to them last year asking to consider moving the jail to a new site because the original 26-acre location fell into an Urban Renewal Agency jurisdiction and could one day be used for a different development in the future…