Posted by Jim Garrett
 
Speaker:  Archuleta County Sheriff Rich Valdez
After vouching for the extraordinary volume of Halloween visitors in Mesa Heights, Sheriff Valdez described the diverse responsibilities of his office in serving the residents of Archuleta County.  Among them, he said, are fighting wildland fires, emergency response, search and rescue (extending into remote parts of Hinsdale and Mineral Counties as well as Archuleta County), community patrol and law enforcement, criminal investigations, traffic control, prisoner housing, prisoner transportation, court security, service of civil process, and animal control.
 
In exemplification of the complexities this extensive list of responsibilities may entail, Valdez discussed an upcoming emergency response drill scheduled for next April.  The drill will be based on a mock emergency, he said, the bursting of the Capote Lake dam with resultant flooding, which would he said have impacts reminiscent of the recent flooding near Boulder, Colorado.   The exercise will involve not only Archuleta County personnel, but as in real life, assets from the Ute Nation, the Forest Service, the National Guard, and neighboring counties. . 
But, the Sheriff also pointed out that many of the diverse responsibilities of the Sheriff’s Office may be exercised primarily out of the public view, and consequently out of the public mind.  Thus, he noted, his office responded to over twenty wildland fires this year, mostly in remote areas with little public impact (if only because prompt suppression was achieved).  Another example he provided was that his office is responsible for the safe custody currently of 12,000 pieces of evidence related to criminal cases.
 
Turning to the responsibilities for housing and transporting prisoners in compliance with Colorado law, Valdez recalled that the Archuleta County Jail was destroyed by flooding in 2015, with the result that prisoners must currently be housed in cells “rented” at the La Plata County Jail.  Concomitantly, transportation of prisoners now requires a three-hour round trip drive by teams of officers, rather than only a brief walk to the courtroom.  The extraordinary expenses associated with these emergency needs must be met by Archuleta County taxpayers in the County’s annual budget – and they are costly, as demonstrated by an example cited by the Sheriff, the out-of-pocket expense of prisoner transportation, amounting so far this year to more than $242,000.
 
On top of the loss of the jail, the Sheriff’s office, located in an adjacent portion of the same building but not destroyed in the flooding, has recently become uninhabitable, with employees having been felled by respiratory ailments due to hydrogen sulfide or some other toxic substance contaminating the premises. 
 
Against this background, the Sheriff described a plan for a new facility, which will be funded by a 1 percent sales tax increase if approved by passage of a ballot question before county voters next month.  The new facility would safely and efficiently house multiple components of the Sheriff’s Office.  It will also include an adjacent jail designed to accommodate 54 prisoners, that could be expanded at low cost when needed at a later time.  It would be built on donated land at Harman Park, near the intersection of Piedra Road and U.S. Route 160.
In response to a question whether there is a current need to house 54 prisoners, the Sheriff noted that a satisfactory detention facility must have capacity to separate different categories of prisoners based on factors such as gender, medical condition, dangerousness and vulnerability, and to separate as well prisoners in the same category who are co-defendants.  Consequently, the need for space is affected by factors in addition to simply counting noses.
 
In addition, he pointed out that growth in the community and its demands for law enforcement (noted as 11 percent last year over the previous year) is generally continuous, so building merely for immediate needs becomes quickly problematic.  The example of the jail recently constructed in Albuquerque, N.M., planned to be adequate to meet 50-year needs, was offered. 
Finally, major parts of the expense of any jail relate to features required to maintain adequate security, and to provide for other essentials associated with detention of prisoners (such as laundry, food service and safe physical activity). 
 
As pointed out in a community meeting later last Thursday evening, construction costs for these elements of the proposed facility would not be affected by reducing its presently anticipated capacity, so reduction of the planned number of beds would not yield anything near to proportionate savings off the expected total cost needed to provide suitable space for the Sheriff’s Office and prisoner detention.