Recent developments in the Smith county jail, “Jailzilla” saga and the “Commissioners Gone Wild” comic drama give rise to numerous questions.

Some of these questions are legal, and I do not know the answers, but I will raise them anyway in the hope that someone will.

• The admission that the plans for the latest Smith county jail proposal were prepared in secret, as I understand, is equivalent to an admission of guilt. This law allows for both civil and criminal penalties for violation. In a county bent on maximum penalties, in a state bent on maximum penalties, can we expect maximum penalties for those involved in this crime and cover up?
• Can we expect resignations to occur soon?
• What will become of this jail proposal, or any jail that might be built as a result of this proposal, now that we know that the plans were formulated in violation of state law?
• Will there be an investigation to see what other open meeting and open records laws were violated?
• What other issues, projects, proposals, contracts, or other matters could have been done under cover of darkness, and behind closed doors, and will there be an investigation including an audit?

This situation is the worst sort of behaviour in public officials, secret meetings and cover ups strike at the very heart of why the open records and open meeting laws are in place.

You can call a pig a cow, but it still smells like pork when it’s cooking. Is it a debate or not? I guess that depends on what your definition of is, is! The Smith county jail “Yes” committee at first refused to debate the jail issue, but has now decided that it will participate in a forum of some sort, not a debate. I think I heard a cow oink!

As far as I can tell, the “yes” people are right! When it comes to this issue,  there really is no debate! There is no defensible rationale for building this jail to begin with. The idea is so outrageous that it almost defies words.

The initial “no debate” response is the one we have come to expect. What else could we expect from a group of people who made their plans in secret, somehow hoping that people would vote for the proposition with no information about it, and no real reason for it. The issue here is trust. The county officials who devised this scheme don’t trust us to make the decision they want us to make if we have the information. The logical extension to this is that it is not needed to begin with, and that they are trying to cover that fact. That is known as arrogance! Not only do they not trust us, they think that we are ignorant enough to not see through it!

October 13 at 6:00 PM is the time, the Tyler Public Library is the place, for the Un-Debate.

The committee to support the new jail proposal, the “Finally! A Jail Plan We Can Afford!” committee is forming. We thought we would like to know what became of the last committees efforts, so we did a little research.

If you would like to see the future of the current Smith county jail proposal, just take a look at the past! We managed to dig up the URL for the last jail proposal support committee, and it will give you a look at the current committees future! This is the current web page for the “Build The Jail Committee” from the 2007 election aftermath. We will title this link:

Back To The Future For Smith County Jail Proposal

We hope that the new committee can come up with something snappy to add to their site after November 6!

Tyler Smith County Jail Bond | Official Arrogance 2008

After the last November election in Smith county, we saw this article: “Smith Voters Send Clear Messages On Jail Proposal” is what the editorial in the Tyler Morning Telegraph said, but the 70 to 30 percent message was apparently not clear enough for the officials who now have a new “jailhouse lite” proposal on the ballot for the next election! The editorial listed three causes for the failure of the last jail bond:

• Price
• Location
• Pay raises

It also touched on what I think is a more probable cause:
“We also believe that voters resented the choice made by Smith County commissioners to limit public dialog.

The message voters received from commissioners, in the format of the town meetings, was “We don’t trust you.” The court’s reasoning behind the format – that naysayers would take up too much time – was flimsy and unconvincing.”

Flimsy and unconvincing? No, just downright arrogant!

In the last November election the naysayers had their say at the voting booth. It was a big horse laugh, and a slap in the face of official arrogance! The message sent back to the commissioners from the naysayers was: “We don’t trust you, either, and we are willing to go to the polling places to prove it!” The naysayers had the final say!

If anything has changed since last Novembers jail bond train wreck, it has been for the worse. Rather than becoming more open and forthright, more deceit, clandestine secrecy, and trickery have been employed!

Well folks, it is time to start looking at what the naysayers say! It is about time for some rethinking. What commissioners should have been looking at is alternatives to a new jail! Not seeing what they could salvage from previous attempts. They should have been asking the questions: “Are the voters right? Do we really need a new jail, or should we look at slowing down the rate of incarceration before we propose to tax the people to penury?”

Some advice to commissioners for the post November sob party:

Stop assuming that we even need a new jail. Start thinking outside the cell. The automatic assumption that because we have a problem with overcrowding, we need to build a new inmate warehouse, is a logical fallacy. If you owned a warehouse, and couldn’t process the goods fast enough, you would probably look at speeding up the process before you started thinking of building a new warehouse. Let’s do the same here.

Ask for public input. The sort of vague, quasi sincere requests for input in the past will not get any real information from the public. It would also be good to allow an anonymous forum for those who might otherwise be too timid to submit suggestions. There is a lot of distrust which apparently has gone unrecognized by county officials.

The last proposal had almost no public input. The proposal for November 2008 had even less! This is seen as arrogance by most people, and people despise arrogance in public officials.

Smith County 2008 Jail Proposal Facts

The following list is a list of facts concerning the Smith county jail proposal.

• Commissioners decided to build a jail and offer two separate proposals on the same ballot. Both were soundly defeated.

• A third proposal was put before the public a year later, and is defeated even more soundly.

• A fourth proposal for an expandable version of the same facility is placed on the ballot for November 2008.

• During all of this time, the public has been told that the cost of housing an inmate in another county is a certain amount, when in fact, the amount only exceeded the cost of housing them in the current Smith county facility by a very small amount.

• The figures for projected needs are so skewed as to be unintelligible. We have been given two differing sets.

• In the years following the initial proposals, alternative programs have been so successful that a continuation of such programs will undoubtedly reduce the jails population to levels lower than the ordered mandate.

• Commissioners have stopped funding one such program, before it had time to succeed.

• Other programs of this type have been suggested, but not funded.

• The need for additional courts, to speed up the terminally slow pretrial process has been ignored.

• A state law allowing for ticketing for minor offenses has been systematically ignored.

• The cost to build such a facility will far exceed the cost presented to the public.

• The cost to run the facility will be an albatross around the collective necks of Smith citizens far into the future.

• These combined costs will exceed the current cost of shipping detainees to other counties far into the future.

• Building the jail will not solve the underlying problems.