Eight properties are in the running to be the location of Aroostook County’s next jail.
The sites, submitted in response to a land search launched by the county last month, include both public and privately owned land along or near the Route 1 corridor. They include three parcels in Caribou, two in Houlton and one each in Presque Isle, Limestone and Fort Fairfield.
The potential jail properties were included in a document summarizing responses to the county’s request for land proposals that County Administrator Justin Tibbetts shared with the Bangor Daily News on Monday. They have not been previously reported.
The wealth of bidders gives Aroostook County options as it moves to replace its 137-year-old jail in downtown Houlton that federal corrections experts have called overcrowded and unsafe. County administration will review sites over the next few weeks with SMRT Architects & Engineers, Tibbetts said.
The County hired SMRT in May to design its next jail. The company can evaluate up to five locations under the terms of its contract.
The sites cost from $1 to more than $1.8 million. The cheapest bidders are towns or quasi-governmental agencies who are seeking to reap the economic benefits of housing the jail and not one-time profits from a land deal.
Two towns, Houlton and Fort Fairfield, submitted bids, as did the Loring Development Authority, which controls most of the former Loring Air Force base in Limestone.
Houlton’s proposed parcel is the biggest, comprising 115 acres in the Houlton Industrial Park and along Route 1. The document does not specify a specific address or price, but the town indicated it would sell the property for low to no cost.
Fort Fairfield submitted a 33-acre lot at the end of Cheney Grove, an industrial area off Route 161 and near Route 1A. The town’s asking price is $1.
The Loring Development Authority offered a 33.6-acre portion of the former Air Force base known as the Tactical Alert Site. The authority also indicated it would sell the property for low to no cost and that it had potential alternative sites on the former base.
The remaining five bidders are all private landowners. They include a “15+” acre site on the Access Road in Houlton for $375,000, a 15-acre plot at 34 Woodland Road in Caribou for $139,900, an 19-acre parcel that borders both Montgomery Avenue and Route 1 in Caribou for $725,000, a 54-acre former mobile home park on Route 1 along the northern outskirts of Presque Isle for $1.3 million and a 73-acre lot between Cary Medical Center and the NAPA Auto Parts store in Caribou for $1.83 million.
A consultant estimated in a needs assessment released last summer that the price tag to construct the jail could range from $91 million to $112 million, depending on its size, but construction costs have risen since.
In that assessment, the consultant recommended that the jail be located either in Houlton or in the vicinity of Presque Isle and Caribou, more central to The County’s population centers.
The report concluded that population shifts have made the existing jail’s location “less than ideal.” The jail was originally built in Houlton because of a former statutory requirement for the facilities to be in the county seat, but that puts it at least a two-hour drive away from many towns in the St. John Valley.
“There were indications from some agencies located to the north that a number of arrests are regularly not made in an effort to reduce trips to the current jail,” the report noted.
Presque Isle, Aroostook County’s biggest city, declined to submit a proposal for the jail to be built on municipal land, citing that it did not have a “suitable parcel” that could accommodate it.
But in a letter sent by City Manager Sonja Eyler to county leaders obtained by the BDN, Eyler outlined that the city’s council “unanimously” supports locating the jail in central Aroostook to “create a facility that is more accessible to the people and systems it must serve.”
Moving the jail outside of Houlton would require a referendum, one of the major points the town referenced to keep the facility in the county seat.
“There’s really no other viable option to keeping [the jail] in Houlton,” Houlton Town Councilor Fred Grant said in a Sept. 22 special meeting in which the Council approved its proposal.
A bond referendum to fund construction of the facility could come before voters as early as next year.
