Detention center canned

Anita Miller

January 17, 2008 11:20 am

— A Louisiana-based firm that wanted to build an immigrant detention center in rural Caldwell County has withdrawn its proposal, county officials said, citing overwhelming opposition by those who live near the intended site.
“They didn’t want it no kind of way,” said Pct. 4 Commissioner Joe Roland, in whose district the facility would have been built.
A representative of Emerald Correctional Management LLC came before the commissioner’s court in Dec. to lay out its proposal for the $30 million, 1,000-bed facility that would be used to separately house men and women who had been detained as illegal immigrants until they could be deported back to their home country.
Roland says the commissioners were told that funding would come from private sources and that the facility would bring in 200 to 225 jobs with an annual payroll of $4 to $5 million.
Roland called a meeting of residents in the area, located in eastern Caldwell County between Lytton Springs and Dale, that an Emerald representative also attended.
“I had the guy himself come down and make the same proposal to them that they made to us,” Roland said, but the neighbors would have nothing of it. “They didn’t want it. He wasn’t going to try to push it down their throats.”
On Monday, commissioners declared the project dead and made it official by unanimously voting against supporting the project.
Roland said initially, the proposal “seemed like an opportunity” that could bring much-needed jobs. He said there was also “a lot of misunderstanding” surrounding the proposal and that the people housed at the facility would not have been hardened criminals, just people who broke the law on a misguided path to a better life.
He said the community meeting was “something I did on my own to find out, to get the pulse of the community.
Public opposition would have been only the first hurdle for the project; commissioners would also have had to figure out how to supply the facility with the estimated 80,000 gallons of water it would need every day.
Emerald operates similar facilities in La Salle, Hudspeth and Haskell counties.

amiller@sanmarcosrecord.com