PIERRE, S.D. – After years of political upheaval, court battles and legislative tugs-of-war, the plan to build a new men’s prison in Lincoln County south of Harrisburg is dead.
Members of the Project Prison Reset work group spent more than eight hours at the Capitol on Tuesday running through possible site locations, building designs, budget needs and public comments before voting unanimously to scratch the original site from its list of replacement options for the aging state penitentiary in Sioux Falls.
Also gone? The former Citibank site in Sioux Falls, a patch of land outside of Huron, a former cheese plant in Grant County – and more than $50 million in cash, spent to prepare the Lincoln County site for a prison that now won’t be built.
The members set a $600 million cap on a penitentiary replacement, budgeting for between 1,500 and 1,700 beds – about the same capacity as the original Lincoln County site, but $125 million under that version’s guaranteed maximum price.
The legislature spent three years dumping money into an incarceration construction fund in the run up to February, the month lawmakers balked at the Lincoln County project’s location and price tag. The project needed but couldn’t secure two-thirds majority support. The failure spurred the creation of the prison reset group by Gov. Larry Rhoden, who’d pushed for the Lincoln County prison.
Now, the task force has asked the state’s contractor, JE Dunn, to study a site in Mitchell, another near Worthing, and state-owned land on the grounds of the Mike Durfee Prison in Springfield and at the penitentiary in Sioux Falls.
House Speaker and task force member Jon Hansen, R-Dell Rapids, said the new parameters are a “departure” from the original plan, but a “necessary step” to find consensus.
“The Legislature has already said we don’t need that big of a prison, we don’t want to spend that much money all in one big shot,” Hansen said.
