Facing staff shortages, Oxbow jail isn't on track to fully open this summer

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SALT LAKE CITY — Even though Salt Lake County leaders budgeted millions to fully open the long-shuttered Oxbow Jail this summer to help alleviate an overcrowding crisis, things aren't going according to plan.

Sheriff Rosie Rivera told the County Council on Tuesday that officials have the money for operations, but they're struggling to find enough new hires to man a fully opened Oxbow. That means, at the current rate, Oxbow will only be able to add another 184-bed pod by July 1, when county leaders had originally hoped all 552 beds would be open.

The additional pod will bring Oxbow's bed availability to 368 — but it will also raise mandatory overtime for each jail deputy from the current requirement of four hours per month to 16 hours per month.

County officials had also originally planned to stop contracting with other counties' jails to house about 300 inmates once Oxbow was fully operational, but now jail staff estimate they'll need to use leftover funds from unfilled positions to continue contracting for about 120 beds.

"If we want to (fully) open Oxbow, we have to find the manpower to do it," Rivera said.

But that's easier said than done.

"The goal was to open up Oxbow fully," Rivera said in an interview after her presentation to the council. "However as we started getting into this, we're realizing that the amount of people applying (in law enforcement) has just dramatically dropped. We don't have the staff to open it."

Currently the jail has 78 vacant positions, and while 50 hires are projected later this year, 50 other positions are projected for turnover, according to jail staff. Rivera said deputies are leaving for higher wages and better benefits elsewhere, and its application pool is dwindling because of higher competition in other agencies.

Meanwhile, the jail has about 71 sworn deputies — or 26 percent of the jail's workforce — eligible for retirement in 2020.

It's not a new problem to Salt Lake County law enforcement agencies, Rivera said, noting that application pools for Unified Police have also been shrinking because of wages and benefits that don't compete with other agencies.

"I'll be honest, I'm alarmed," Salt Lake County Council Chairwoman Aimee Winder Newton said. "I feel like we have a law enforcement crisis coming our way, and we don't have even our local police departments able to be staffed. I mean, this is a bigger problem than just what's going on at the jail."

"It is," Rivera said.

From last year:

Meanwhile, the Salt Lake County Jail continues overcrowding releases, currently declining to keep certain offenders behind bars. For men, they're only jailing offenders with class A misdemeanors or higher, and for women it's third-degree felonies or higher, said Chief Deputy Kevin Harris, though he noted that risk assessment process is constantly being re-evaluated.

"Law enforcement drops them off, says 'I think this guy should stay.' We don't have the bed space so we pretty much walk them out the back door after we do the initial booking," Harris said.

The sheriff didn't make any proposals to the County Council on Tuesday, noting she hoped to start by putting the issue on the council's radar. But she said she plans to come back with a proposal in a month or two to address staffing challenges, including salary "compression" after county staff stopped getting pay raises for several years amid tight budgets.

Whether that means she'll need millions more for the jail, Rivera said it's too soon to say.

"We don't know what it's going to take," the sheriff said.

In late 2017, Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams proposed using more than $7 million this year and about $9 million in ongoing funds to fully open Oxbow by July — a plan the County Council later approved.

McAdams said in an interview Tuesday the delay wasn't "unexpected," noting that he and his staff knew it would be an "aggressive timeline" to fully open Oxbow by this summer.

"Thankfully we have the contingency plan and we're still able to use the contracting beds," the mayor said. "So we'll continue to work within that framework to continue to keep our communities safe."

McAdams said "we'll continue to work toward the goal" of fully opening Oxbow, but he added "I don't think there's any urgency to do it" because there's no "drop dead deadline" that the jail bed contracting program would need to phase out.

As for mandatory overtime and other hiring issues, McAdams said he'll look to the sheriff and her proposed strategies to hire and keep new employees.

"We need to explore every option," McAdams said, adding that he looks to the sheriff to work with human resources to study benefits and pay for areas of improvement.

Despite mandatory overtime, employee morale is "still pretty good," Rivera said, calling her employees "incredible people that go 110 percent every day."

But she acknowledged "we're going to have to rely on our staff quite a bit to keep this thing going," so "that's why we want to make sue we're compensating them fairly to retain them."

"I'm confident that the council will see the need, and I'm confident that they'll do everything they can to help us," Rivera said, adding that employee and inmate safety are non-negotiable.

"If it is not safe, we won't do it."