The future of Ector County’s proposed new youth center is up in the air after failing to attract any contractors.
Juvenile Probation Director Kevin Mann said county commissioners will soon have to decide if they want to wait to build the new facility or cut features from it.
Ector County Purchasing Director Lucy Soto said that not only did the facility fail to attract any contractors, but those contractors who spoke with her informally said there is no way the county can build the facility for the $25 million that has been budgeted.
One contractor said the facility would cost at least $35 million and that estimate wasn’t even the highest one, Soto said.
The cost of steel, concrete and other materials are just skyrocketing, she said.
“This market is something I’ve never seen before and I’ve been in purchasing for 24 years,” Soto said.
The new facility, which will be built on U.S. 385, is meant to replace the existing 48-year-old center on East Yukon Road.
As designed, the building is supposed to address practical issues that arise every day in the current building, but give staff and stakeholders a better chance at rehabilitating the kids, too, Mann said.
The facility would increase the number of beds from 48 to 64, have a multi-purpose room, gym and vocational building. It’s also been designed with double the number of dayrooms, a library and multiple courtyards with space for a garden, Mann said.
The new facility would help staff keep kids separate from each other in terms of gender, the type of crime they’re accused of committing and their age. It would also help improve security and privacy issues and give the county a chance to provide more rehabilitative programs, he said.
The plan was also to once again house kids who are currently being shipped outside the county to serve their time, Mann said. In October 2020, the county began sending kids who were adjudicated delinquent or violated their probation to other counties to serve their time.
Right now it costs the county $197 per inmate per day to send those kids out of the county, he said.
The dream was for kids to be able to stay in Ector County and give their families the ability to visit them more readily. In addition, the county would also be able to bring back an aftercare program for those same kids to help them transition back into the community.
In the coming days, Soto said she plans to meet with Mann, architects and county staff to determine what, if anything, can be done to lower the cost of the project. The county would then likely go out to bid again, but include contractors outside the local area, too.
“I’m really disappointed,” Mann said. “We had this dream and this vision and now we’re wondering ‘How do we get there?’”
If it were up to him, Mann said he’d like to wait to see if the economy improves so the county can build the facility as designed.
If not, Mann said he suspects the facility would have to be built without the courtyards, some of the extra beds and other aspects meant to improve the county’s rehabilitative efforts.
Without the extra beds, Mann said the county wouldn’t be able to bring some kids back to Ector County.
“I’d rather wait for when the market calms down to get what we want and what the community deserves,” Mann said.
In the end, the decision may end up being taken out of their hands unfortunately, Mann said.
If the county does go out to bid again and the price tag comes back extraordinarily high, the county may be forced to pause the project, he said.
Over the last five years, an average of roughly 260 kids per year have spent time in the youth center waiting for their cases to be resolved, county statistics show. From 2017 through 2020, another 35 kids per year spent time in the center as part of their sentence or after having violated their probation.
Court statistics show the kids usually spent anywhere from three weeks up to four months in the facility.
