Despite pleas from law enforcement and other community leaders to tax themselves to build a bigger jail, voters in Yellowstone County shot down the measures handily on Election Day.
Both the $175 million bond and the $20 million levy were voted down 56% to 44%, or by a margin of more than 7,000 votes. The bond would have funded construction of an additional 332 beds, including 12 in a medical unit. It would have been repaid over 20 years. The levy would have permanently funded operations to sustain the expansion.
On a Billings home with a taxable value of $300,000, annual property taxes would have increased by $163 a year for the first 20 years while the county was paying off the bond. After that, those yearly taxes would be $99 higher than current levels.
Capt. Brandon Smart, the jail’s commander, told Montana Free Press Wednesday that the results didn’t surprise him.
“They had a couple of town hall get-togethers and stuff, and they weren’t well attended at all,” Smart said. “And some of the Facebook comments leading up to it. I had concerns that, you know, it was probably going to go about like it went.”
Smart said he heard from many residents that they were tired of rising property taxes. He said he was disappointed to see that broad voter support for Sheriff-elect Kent O’Donnell and Commissioner-elect Chris White, both of whom supported jail expansion, didn’t translate into support for the jail measures themselves.
“That correlation just bugged my brain a little bit,” he said.
Proponents of the bond and levy warned of possible lawsuits over conditions in the crowded jail if the measures failed. The group pushing for expansion, Safe and Secure Yellowstone County, sent mailers and promoted a video online that talked about the dangers of the current situation, highlighting an incident in which an inmate stabbed two detention officers.
Smart said Wednesday that despite the crowding, “we’re able to mitigate” safety risks for officers “better than anyone else is doing.” Smart pointed to an innovation award the jail earned from the National Institute of Jail Operations in June, highlighting some of the changes made in response to crowding, such as a new arraignment court to streamline the charging process for people in jail facing cases in different courts, as well as a new, $6 million short-term holding wing for DUIs and repeat, low-level cases that officers think will escalate.
Smart said he told his lieutenants Wednesday morning after the results were clear that it was “business as usual.”
“We make the best of a bad situation, which is what we’ve been doing for a long time,” Smart said.
By the county’s estimate, the new jail would have met the county’s needs through 2049, as population and demand on the jail continued to grow.
The jail has $9.5 million in deferred maintenance, including Americans with Disabilities Act accessibility and code compliance. Those deficiencies will still need to be fixed, even without new tax revenue, the county’s website explained.
In 2015, voters shot down — by 10 percentage points — a much smaller tax hike that would have helped pay for a new women’s unit. The county then used a bond sale instead to finance the construction. The county still has millions of dollars left to pay back on that, according to Commissioner Mark Morse.
Jack Hanson, a Billings homeowner who frequently attends local government meetings, has vocally opposed the jail expansion plan for months, including at public meetings and in media statements. He called the vote outcome “decisive” and said he and others who have opposed the measure since the beginning felt “vindicated.”
“As I’ve said publicly many times: It was just unreasonable. And voters saw that,” Hanson told MTFP. “It was way too big. It was way too expensive. And it included zero resources whatsoever for addressing the underlying causes of crime.”
Hanson said he hoped county officials would revisit the jail crowding topic with voters soon by proposing a “more modest and more targeted” proposal and stressed the need for it to include efforts to address the root causes of crime.
Hanson said county commissioners had prioritized jail expansion in recent months and hadn’t done enough to respond to voter concerns about the Broadview data center, funding cuts to the Yellowstone Art Museum and “packing the library board with book banners.”
“And this decision, to my mind, is just a tremendous vote of no confidence in our current county leadership,” Hanson said. “And I say that because our county commissioners spent the last six months focused on one single thing: pushing this massive jail expansion. And they did that to the detriment of pretty much every other thing that their constituents kept telling them, ‘We care about this other stuff.’”
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