The Escambia County Commission gave staff the go-ahead to pursue creating design criteria for a 1,476-bed facility to replace the county jail.

The facility will replace the current jail and the Central Booking and Detention facility, which was damaged by a natural gas explosion on April 30.

Commissioners had two options when they discussed the matter at their committee meeting this week:

— Building a 697-bed replacement for Central Booking. The estimated cost is $76.9 million, not including the cost of housing inmates out-of-county or site acquisition, should a new location be desired. The kitchen, laundry, infirmary, administration and security areas would be designed to accommodate growth.

The timeline for that project is estimated at three years.

• Ñ Building a 1,476-bed replacement for the main jail and Central Booking combined. The cost is estimated at $161 million, not including site acquisition or out-of-county inmate housing. The timeline is three years, three months.

Building one replacement facility will help diminish design inefficiencies that already exist at the main jail, said Commissioner Grover Robinson.

“We knew we had issues with the main jail we were going to have to deal with,” Robinson said.

The explosion at Central Booking, on the heels of historic rainfall that flooded the basement of the facility that housed some 607 people at the time, killed two inmates, paralyzed a corrections officer and injured 184 people.

The State Attorney’s Office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are investigating the cause of the explosion.

Upgrades to Central Booking were in the local option sales tax project wish list for incremental upgrades.

Central Booking flooded in 2012 after a deluge of rain as well. Escambia Sheriff David Morgan warned county commissioners afterward that future damage and potentially dire consequences could result if critical equipment was not moved out of the basement of Central Booking.

A location for the new jail has not yet been determined.

David Wheeler, the county’s director of facilities management, said the deadline for letters of information from private property owners of 50 acres or greater who may be interested in selling to the county for a new jail is Aug. 30.

The idea is to bring commissioners a short list of design professionals for a new jail by the Nov. 6 commission meeting.

There also was discussion about whether the replacement facility would be a single story, campus-style facility or multistory.

Commissioner Gene Valentino indicated he favored a campus-style setting as opposed to a high-rise and that it was important to him that the location of the new jail include room to expand to suit the future needs.

“I really don’t care where it’s located,” Valentino said. “I do care that it’s big enough to expand. Technology will keep us directly in contact with the judges downtown.”

Later he clarified that he hoped that the design would include enough elasticity for future needs as well as programs and facilities to reduce recidivism and skills training to help inmates reintegrate into society upon their release.

“(Also) we could do for other communities what their doing for us, (housing our inmates) and charge for it, make money off of it, let it pay for itself,” Valentino said.

Commissioners Steven Barry and Lumon May (who both voted nay in moving forward with the design criteria) expressed concerns about going too far down the road, given that the county doesn’t know how much insurance money it will receive for the project, nor does it know how much money it may receive from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to put toward the project.

“Is it reasonable to assume that the insurance company may come back and tell us we need to repair the existing jail rather than tear it down?” May asked.

“Yes,” said County Attorney Allison Rogers.

Barry said he was concerned about setting the footprint of a building without some sense of how much money could come from insurance and FEMA.

“I’m not necessarily interested in having more capacity,” as a jail master plan that calls for a capacity of 1,800 beds, Barry said.

On Aug. 11, phase-one stabilization began at Central Booking. The insurance company has hired Terhaar & Conley to stabilize the building, which includes additional fencing and removing two pieces of structural steel on the north side of Central Booking and some basic perimeter shoring in the laundry room to allow access, Wheeler said.

From there the insurance company will examine the facility and estimate the cost of the damage, Wheeler said.

The insured value of the Central Booking building is up to $45 million for the physical structure and up to $25 million in flood insurance coverage, county officials have reported.

County officials are pursuing FEMA money to help fund the replacement project.

Female inmates are being housed in Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties; Santa Rosa is charging Escambia $58 per person per day. Male inmates are being housed in the main jail, road prison in Cantonment or in the work-release center on Fairfield Drive.

There is a purchase order of $5 million signed to cover to cost of housing inmates out of county.

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