By MATT PIKE
Officials with Buchanan County hope to break ground soon on an expansion to the Juvenile Justice Academy adding more space to the facility.
Currently, the facility houses just six beds. The expansion will add 18 more, upping capacity to 24.
Buchanan County Presiding Commissioner Scott Nelson says the upgrade is big in helping keep the community safe, and helps save resources for law enforcement who previously may have no had a place to put youth taken off the street.
“You’re wasting a lot of resources, a lot of police deputies and things like that, picking up people and knowing that they’re not going anywhere, they’re just going to go in, process, they’re going to be out, because there’s no space, and guess what they’re going to do, you think they’re going to stop? No,” Nelson says on the KFEQmunnity show. “They’ve got it figured it, which is sad too, so the idea of being able to house them now and get them off the street is big.”
Nelson says the project has been talked about for some time now, starting to hear about it himself his second year in his seat
"So then you start saying are we just going to talk about this or can we facilitate a project? And I can only speak for the county, we don’t like taxes, we don’t like to produce a new tax or promote a new tax, we want to be able to, I call it, be able to do it in house, and sometimes we have to stretch that out a little bit,” Nelson explains. “But, instead of just talking about it, it’s like ok do we want to do it and we decided we did, and that got the ball rolling.”
Nelson says the once the construction begins it will happen in two phases
“They're going to build the new stuff, which is the 24 beds, get that ready to go and then there’s going to be a transfer time of the people and the workers and administration stuff like that, they’ll move those people into the new facility,” Nelson says. “And then they’ll start reworking a little bit of the space in the old facility to match up in that regard.”
The project is set to take around 18 months to complete, being finished around late 2027, if construction begins around that May timeframe.
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