Conversations regarding the recently acquired Orange County Northern Campus site are continuing as cost projections now exceed the budgeted amount.

The site, located off of Route 70, is slated to hold the new Orange County Detention Center along with a new Parks and Recreation and agricultural center. Commissioners initially appropriated $28 million for the project, according to county documents. But costs were reevaluated after recent completion of schematic designs, and the county staff projected that the costs, if no adjustments were made, would exceed that amount by $13 million.

The three projects proposed for the site have been included in the county’s Capital Investment Plan “for several years without budget escalation to recognize inflationary cost pressures,” according to the agenda from the February 5 Board of County Commissioners meeting. Construction costs have also escalated dramatically in recent years as demand has increased.

An agricultural center is a state-run facility for farmers to do business, and chair of the commissioners Penny Rich says it is integral to an agricultural community such as rural Orange County.

“Orange county is a rural community,” says Rich. “Even though we have Chapel Hill and Carrboro as our towns, the rest of it is rural. And so we need an [agricultural] center that’s functioning and working and safe for our workers to be in.”

Rich cited prisoner safety as the main reason for building a new detention center.

“All these buildings are really old,” says Rich. “We can keep putting band-aids on them, except for the jail. We’re done with the band-aids there. It’s inhumane to keep people in that jail.”

The plans call for a 144-bed detention center which has caused the project to go slightly over budget, which according to Rich is not out of the ordinary.

She says population growth and space for federal prisoners passing through the county system were both factors taken into account when coming up with that number.

“This jail needs to last for 50, 60 years, that’s the bottom line,” says Rich. “I don’t want to put that burden on the next group of county commissioners.”

The county receives money for housing federal inmates.

Staff put forward options to reduce the costs of the project, including deferring other county projects, eliminating some pieces of the proposal through value engineering or reducing the overall scope of the project by dropping the number of beds in the detention center.

Commissioners approved a plan at the February 5 meeting to reduce some costs of the project. Commissioners then approved a budget amendment at Tuesday night’s meeting “to appropriate the additional costs needed for the project.”

Photo via Orange County

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