Commissioner Skip Alston during last night’s debate on the new county jail:

I hope this board will not have the gall to go out and borrow $104-$105 million without the voters’ approval…..This is not a crisis situation. ….Right now, I don’t see the urgency, but I guess we have been made to believe there is some urgency. I would hope within the next three or four months we will see that we have some options.

By far the most interesting part of last night’s discussion was the exchange between Alston, fellow Commissioner Bruce Davis and Sheriff B.J. Barnes, during which Alston and Davis pointedly questioned whether or not the jail is indeed overcrowded. It seems as though Alston and Davis recently paid an unannounced visit to the jail and discovered an empty cell block.

Davis said he was just trying to find out if there was a legitimate reason why there would be a an empty block. But he got a bit testy with the deputy who was trying to figure out exactly when Davis visited and exactly what was going on during that particular visit.

“Don’t hold me to the three weeks. You know what I’m talking about,” Davis told the deputy.

Alston’s angle was the number of inmates sleeping on the floor was equal to the capacity of the empty block. So, he argued, while the jail may technically have been over capacity, no one was sleeping on the floor. Admittedly, the answers provided by Barnes and his deputies weren’t entirely satisfactory. The number may have been higher that day, inmates in the empty block may have been in class, they may have been out working, they may have been shuttled around to clean or paint. They didn’t seem to know exactly what going on, which isn’t a comforting thought no matter how you look at it.

I don’t know who’s divorced from reality here. Just about everyone seems to agree that we need a new $104 million jail. It’s too bad Alston is the strongest voice in opposition, because few serious people take him seriously in return.