The Yolo County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to kill construction of a proposed rural state re-entry prison.
Supervisors decided that with a looming $24 million budget deficit and limited staff resources, continuing to pursue the re-entry prison is no longer worth the time and effort.

It was a different story last September, when supervisors offered the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation a site in the small community of Madison, against the angry protests of rural residents.

In the deal, Yolo County was eligible for $30 million for an expansion of its overcrowded jail in Woodland. The funding was part a statewide prison reform effort, signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in May 2007…

Yolo County's pursuit of jail expansion funding by way of giving the state a rural site for prison construction might be dropped Tuesday with the availability of the money becoming increasingly uncertain. The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to reconsider at Tuesday's meeting the county's application for the bond funds through the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR. Yolo County qualified for $30 million for an expansion of the overcrowded county jail, under Assembly Bill 900 signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in May 2007.

The board approved a private property at County Road 90 and State Route 16 near small unincorporated town of Madison to be offered to the state as a site for a prison re-entry facility. The decision, arrived at in a meeting last September, was and remains hotly contested by residents of the rural county…

Local officials have identified a site at the Yolo County Airport as a possible location for a proposed state prison re-entry facility.

A town hall-style meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. today in Lillard Hall, 24905 County Road 95, to discuss potential effects on the area.

The county has applied to host a re-entry facility in exchange for $30 million from the state to expand its overcrowded jail in Woodland…

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office mistakenly sent the wrong letter to a Woodland resident that caused quite a stir in the community last week.

It started when Woodland resident Arnold Sargent sent a letter to Schwarzenegger earlier this month, voicing his concerns over a controversial state prison re-entry facility proposed to be located in Yolo County.

The re-entry facilities are designed to house prisoners from state facilities in their home counties during the last year of their sentence. While there, inmates will learn job training skills and receive counseling, prison officials have said…

The battle over a state prison reentry facility in Yolo County continued at Tuesday's Board of Supervisors meeting.

Representatives from the State Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation brought out a public relations arsenal ranging from environmental specialist to criminal reform experts to explain for the first directly to the public how a prison reentry facility will benefit the county.

Also on hand were about 40 residents from the Dunnigan and Zamora areas - the county's favored spot to place the proposed facility - to express their opposition to the site and frustration over why it took the county so long to come forward with the details…

While a well-designed re-entry process that allows prisoners to learn marketable job skills and transition into law-abiding citizens is a worthy goal, I have two concerns about the proposed re-entry facility for Yolo County. I find both the ambiguity of the county's role in providing "services" and the proposed location troubling.

We have no estimates of the long-term cost to the county for housing this facility. Budget shortfalls at the state level seem likely to shift more and more responsibility and expense to the county under the guise of the "collaborative partnership" so vaguely described in AB 900. Yolo County tax payers a decade from now are likely to pay escalating costs associated with services for this facility, and these costs will be even higher if the facility is located at a distance from existing county infrastructure. Surely there are less risky ways to provide funding for more beds in our jail…?

Public Safety is one of the most important responsibilities of government. No question. No debate. So what are we doing to ensure public safety in Yolo County?

Our jail is literally bursting at the seams. Within three years of its opening in 1983, the courts ordered a limit on the number of prisoners our jail could hold no matter how many people get arrested each day, or convicted of crimes requiring jail terms. What does that mean?

It means we can not hold all of the people that are arrested and convicted today - not in the future - today. We simply do not have enough cells to incarcerate everyone…

What was once described by county officials as a "remote" possibility now seems an imminent reality - a state prison re-entry facility is coming to Yolo County. That has residents in the county's unincorporated areas, where the re-entry projects are proposed, angry with questions.

At a town meeting in Zamora Monday night, about 50 residents bombarded supervisors Matt Rexroad, who supports the idea, and Duane Chamberlain, who is against it, with their concerns and in some cases outright hostility toward the idea of a "mini-prison" located near their small town. Both men came to speak about the proposed facilities.

"I have never seen people this organized to defeat something in 40 years," said Keith Williams, chairman of the Dunnigan Advisory Committee, who also attended the Zamora meeting. "People do not want to see their town dominated by a prison"…

Resulting influx of state funds would help Yolo with its jail expansion.

Yolo County has positioned itself to receive potentially millions in state money for jail expansion by agreeing to locate a new "re-entry" prison for inmates ticketed for home.

Undersheriff Tom Lopez confirmed Friday that Yolo County has agreed to host a 150-bed re-entry facility for prisoners in the final months of their sentences at its jail campus on Gibson Road in Woodland.

The agreement gives Yolo County a big boost in its application for jail expansion money under last year's Assembly Bill 900, the state's plan to add 46,000 beds to California's prisons and jails. The bill initially had sought a 53,000-bed expansion.