County Judge Allen Dodson set tentative goals for the allocation of Faulkner County’s remaining unencumbered American Rescue Plan funds at its quorum court meeting April 18.
“Any of these may change up or down, but that is our best guess at what an appropriate amount of ARP unencumbered funds set aside should be,” Dodson said.
Dodson said his administration thinks $5-5.5 million of the $10 million remaining unencumbered funds should be spent on a new detention facility, which would cover its construction and the costs of adding a medium-security unit and a sheriff’s office.
“We recognize the need to provide more than just two levels of security; we have minimum security and maximum security,” Dodson said.
Chief Deputy Chad Wooley gave the report from the Faulkner County Sheriff’s Office and said the high-security facility, unit one, has a capacity of 118 but had an average of 166 inmates.
Dodson said that he wants the detention center to be built in “a scalable way to accommodate future growth.”
“I think we lived through the difficulties when we built the justice building, in 2013-14, of building a much bigger facility without providing for a budget to operate a bigger facility,” he said.
Dodson recommended the county spend $1-1.5 million on the construction of the animal shelter.
“We’re gonna work really hard to get below that because the goal is to make those three bits of that facility in Spring Hill with ARP funding so that we can set aside or give to that facility all of the volunteer tax money that it has raised thus far as operating capital,” he said.
Dodson said the county should allocate $1 million each to the 911 public safety answering point consolidation project, improvements to county buildings, and river levee flood risk mitigation, Dodson said.
He said the consolidation of the county’s 911 PSAP operation centers was “mandatory,” but that “it’s not going to be painless.”
“We’re tasked with figuring out how much money do we have to pay upfront to make that happen,” Dodson said.
He said the courthouse needed its HVAC system upgraded as well as its historic windows refurbished, and that the justice building has needs for improvement in its security system, from “cameras, to servers, power units, the location of camera systems.”
Dodson said they must address river levee protections, which is why he wants the county to reserve $1 million for local governments to apply for match funding.
“Anybody who lived here in 2019 understands that,” Dodson said, referring to the historic Arkansas River floods, which the National Centers for Environmental Information estimated caused $3.5 billion worth of damage through eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas.