Alabama Senate committee delays vote on additional borrowing for Escambia prison

by Ralph Chapoco, Alabama Reflector
February 5, 2025

The head of the Alabama Senate’s General Fund committee Wednesday delayed a vote on a bill to allow the state to borrow an additional $500 million to build a prison in Escambia County.

Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, told members of the Finance and Taxation General Fund Committee he wanted to hold off a committee vote on SB 60 but he declined to state a reason.

“What we are doing here is using a means so that we stop looking in the sofa cushions,” Albritton said, citing difficulties the state has faced in finding money to fund two new prison facilities.

He added that using bonds is just an option that will be used so that there is enough money.

“We are simply going to authorize an additional $500 million in bonds to be able to complete the construction of both facilities completely,” he said.

Amid decades-long overcrowding and a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit over prison conditions, the Alabama Legislature in 2021 approved a $1.3 billion plan to build two 4,000-bed men’s prisons. One facility will be located in Elmore County; one will be in Escambia. The state used $400 million in COVID relief funds for the project, as well as $135 million from the General Fund, and borrowed the remainder.

But the cost of the Elmore County facility, named the Governor Kay Ivey Correctional Complex last year, has ballooned to more than $1.08 billion, consuming nearly all of the additional appropriations. The state also struggled to borrow the money needed to pay the initial cost.

“We were only able to borrow, when we went to market, $500 million of that $785 million,” Albritton said. “And then we discovered that the estimates were slightly inaccurate in that the cost of the Elmore is about $1.08 billion.”

This bill leaves the original proposal largely intact, with most of the modifications isolated to increasing the amount that the state can finance by $500 million to total $1.285 billion.

State prison officials have said the prison facilities will allow the Alabama Department of Corrections (DOC) to close facilities that have deteriorated and can no longer be used, which Albritton reiterated to committee members Wednesday.

In an interview with reporters after the meeting, Albritton declined to state the cost of the planned prison construction facility in Escambia, only saying that the state had accumulated enough funding to pay for 60% of the cost to construct the prison.

“We discovered that much of our funding that we were putting in was going unspent,” he said.

Albritton said, for example, unspent money because the ADOC has not been able to hire corrections officers.

“And we put conditional funding in for the last number of years to cover those. We haven’t been able to hire anybody,” he said.

Instead of using the allocated money for operating funds, Albritton said the state will shift those funds toward the cost of the new prison construction slated in Escambia.

ADOC still has vacant corrections officer positions that it needs to fill because of a court ruling after people who are incarcerated filed a lawsuit alleging they are not receiving adequate medical and mental health treatment.

“That is right, but we still have conditional funding to meet that when that occurs,” Albritton said regarding hiring more corrections officers in the future.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

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