Lawmakers are considering selling the former Southeast State Correctional Facility in Windsor, which has sat empty for nearly four years. Gov. Phil Scott recommended the sale in his proposed capital budget, which is now before a House committee.
The prison has been out of use since 2017, when it was deemed fiscally unsustainable to continue to operate. The empty facility cost more than $200,000 a year to maintain as of 2018, according to a report issued at the time by the state Department of Buildings and General Services.
The scenic, farm-style correctional facility, which for many years had a reputation as the most beautiful in the state, was also the most expensive to operate. The physical layout of the buildings required it to have an “unusually high ratio” of corrections officers to inmates, according to the 2018 report.
In the spring of that year, the site was appraised at $1.1 million. At the time, officials said it could be converted at a relatively low cost into office space for state workers — perhaps for employees of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, whose Springfield office was already overcrowded.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and state employees began working from home en masse, causing officials to reconsider that plan.
“The administration has reevaluated that,” said Rep. Alice Emmons, D-Springfield, who chairs the House Committee on Corrections and Institutions. Her panel took testimony on the idea Tuesday morning as it considered the capital bill for next fiscal year.
“It would be expensive to get Fish and Wildlife up there. They’re thinking within this Covid world and after that, that they may not need as much office space going forward,” she said.
Erik Filkorn, principal assistant at the Department of Buildings and General Services, said the building has too many corners, stairways to nowhere and other engineering quirks ill-suited for even an office building — much less a correctional facility.
“It’s just a drain,” Filkorn said, noting the massive annual cost of upkeep. “And this year, we saw an opportunity to potentially not have to keep it on life support.”
As far as who would buy the site, Filkorn said it’s anybody’s guess at this point.
“This is just sort of lore, but at one point there was talk of potentially establishing a brewery there, or a business park, or it could be developed into half a dozen residential lots,” Filkorn said. He said the Town of Windsor would probably get the first crack at buying the site, if it was interested.
Filkorn said there’s a lot of sentimental attachment to the site, which the state has owned for nearly 100 years. But at this point, he said, that’s pretty much the only reason left to hold onto it.
“We’ve thought long and hard and cooperated excessively with other state agencies about how we might use the facility going forward, but we don’t see a good efficient use of the space, and we don’t want to keep the town hanging any more,” he said. “We’d like to see it move on to the next phase, so that’s why it’s in [the capital budget] this year.”
Not everyone agrees with the plan. Steve Howard, president of the Vermont State Employees’ Association, submitted proposed language to the committee on Tuesday that would do the exact opposite.
He asked lawmakers to reallocate funds to rehabilitate and repurpose the 120-acre property to serve as a medium or low-risk correctional facility for adults — a move that the town has consistently opposed. Howard asked lawmakers to take a “bold step” and put an end to the state’s practice of sending incarcerated individuals to out-of-state, private prisons.
As of Tuesday, according to the Department of Corrections, 168 Vermont inmates were being held at Mississippi’s Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility, which is operated by CoreCivic.
“We oppose the sale of the Windsor facility so long as we have a single inmate at the correctional facility in Mississippi,” Howard said.
He said the Windsor facility could house primarily Vermont’s oldest prisoners. The scenic campus would be an “ideal place” for older offenders to spend a later stage of their lives, Howard said.
Additionally, he said, the site could include 10 beds for justice-involved youth or juvenile offenders who need supervision.
Howard said renovating the site wouldn’t necessarily be cheap, but it would make more sense than the state’s current plan to replace the recently shuttered Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Essex. The state may spend as much as $3.2 million to renovate a Newbury treatment center that the state doesn’t even own to accommodate justice-involved youth.
Rep. Karen Dolan, D-Essex, said it’s important to remember that all lawmakers can do in the capital bill is decide to keep or not keep the property. She said they could not force other state agencies to make use of it, if they were to decide not to sell. Those discussions, she said, would be better suited for a human services committee.
“We haven’t made any decisions at this point on the Windsor property,” Emmons said. “I know we’re struggling with it, but we’re doing more markup this week.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: State considers selling Windsor prison property.