The city of Vicksburg will not have its own jail.

Mayor George Flaggs Jr. said a report from the board’s jail committee indicated it will cost more to manage and operate a facility than what the city is presently paying to house prisoners at the Issaquena County Correctional Facility and the Madison County Jail. 

In a related matter, Flaggs said the Kuhn Memorial Hospital property, which the city owns, is “off the table” as a possible county jail site.

“It would cost about three times as much to keep prisoners here than what we are paying to send our prisoners to Issaquena and Madison County,” said Police Chief Milton Moore, the committee’s chairman.

Moore said after the meeting a contractor with experience building jails estimated it would cost between $3.5 to $6 million to build the jail, adding the project would be done under a lease-purchase agreement that would be paid off in 20 years at a rate of $310,000 to $320,000 per month.

Flaggs said he wanted to privatize the jail’s operations by hiring a private corrections company to run the facility. Moore said the cost of operating the jail was estimated at $956,000 a year.

“From 2015 to 2017, we paid $350,000 a year to house our prisoners at Issaquena and Madison,” he said. Issaquena, he said, charges the city $28 per inmate per day to house city prisoners. Madison County charges $45 per inmate per day.

Flaggs announced the committee’s recommendation at the start of Friday’s meeting of the Board of Mayor and Aldermen while discussing a conversation he had with Warren County Supervisors William Banks and Charles Selmon concerning the county jail.

“We are going to wait and see what the supervisors do on the (county) jail going forward,” Flaggs said. He said Banks and Selmon “left the opportunity open for us to discuss a design that would accommodate at least 35 (city prisoners).

“If the board of supervisors open up the opportunity for us to negotiate with them, we can take the $4.4 million that we were looking at in the master plan to build the jail, and collaborate with them and save the taxpayers in the city money.”

The Kuhn property, which is the site of the former Kuhn Memorial Hospital, was one of four properties recommended as a possible county jail site in January.

The city acquired the property in November with plans to clear the site and find a private nonprofit company to redevelop the property into a mixed-use residential/recreational and retail development. Flaggs said Friday the city was returning to that plan.

The board Friday also authorized city clerk Walter Osborne to advertise for bids to remove the asbestos in the buildings on the property, demolish them, remove an underground diesel storage tank and clean off the property.

The city has an $850,000 Environmental Protection Agency Brownfields grant to help cover the cost of the demolition and cleanup.