Incoming Jacksonville City Council president Ron Salem said one of his main priorities when he takes the helm will be building a new jail and moving it away from its current home just off East Bay Street downtown.
In an interview on This Week In Jacksonville on Wednesday, Salem said the jail is over 30 years old and not in good condition.
“I’ll be setting up a process where we can have that public discussion involving the public defender, the courts, the state attorney, the clerk of the court, bringing all the people together and trying to figure out where we move it, what services are provided, mental health, health care, etc. in order to we can begin the process of hopefully building a new jail at some point in the future,” Salem said.
Moving the jail has also been a priority for outgoing Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry for years.
Curry made moving the jail out of downtown part of the city’s capital improvement project. Curry said in 2018 that the move “faces some challenges,” but the goal is to get government buildings away from the river and create a unified Bay Street corridor.
No potential locations were immediately pinpointed by Curry back then, but one suggestion is to build a pretrial detention facility on Lannie Road on the Northside, on property adjoining the Montgomery Correctional Center. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office estimated it would cost $246 million.
On Wednesday, Salem said the estimated cost and the possible location are still up in the air.
“We’ve just begun to look at hiring a consultant that will aid us in that process. So I really have no idea. I think it depends a great deal on where we put it. There’s been discussion of the prison farm [officially the Montgomery Correctional Center] we had on the north side, potentially Cecil Field, so a lot of it depends upon where we locate it,” Salem said.
It’s not clear where incoming Mayor-Elect Donna Deegan and recently installed Sheriff T.K. Waters stand on the prospect of a new jail but JSO is set to unveil its budget priorities during a presentation on Thursday afternoon.
News4JAX reached out to JSO for comment about the possibility of a new jail but it did not immediately respond.