Detroit City Airport On Panel List of Possible Sites for Courts, Jails
Detroit City Airport, the old Tiger Stadium and the eyesore Michigan Central Depot are all under study as possible sites for a proposed regional criminal justice campus.
Finding an appropriate site is one challenge that must be overcome before Wayne County Executive Robert Ficano's vision -- a one-stop shop for a multi-county courts and detention center -- could become reality.
Ficano must also find a way to pay for his vision, and Oakland, Macomb and other counties in southeastern Michigan must buy into his vision of regional rather than a series of strictly local criminal justice facilities.
But Ficano and a task force headed by former Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer and former Michigan Treasurer Doug Roberts have concluded that the economies inherent in a modern, centralized home for local courts and jails are worth the effort.
"This is going to be one of those things when you've got to show that regionalism works," Ficano said Tuesday. "We're excited about it. It makes all the sense in the world."
Archer and Roberts submitted their preliminary findings in a Sept. 28 report that Ficano made public this week. The report suggests that a new justice campus should be built by a private company that would then lease space in it to the various courts and police agencies.
The next step is for Ficano to select a program manager to oversee the site selection, design and completion. Barring any complications, Ficano said he expects the county to seek proposals for the manager's job in coming weeks.
Ultimately, any plan would require approvals from the Wayne County Commission, Detroit City Council, and other government agencies.
It's the rundown nature of the old Wayne County Jail, the Detroit Police Department headquarters and other criminal justice facilities that underscores the need for new facilities.
But rather than build separate new facilities in a variety of locations, Ficano is pushing the idea of a centralized campus to minimize costs of prisoner transportation and other operations.
In Ficano's broadest concept, the new center would house all Wayne County courtrooms and jail cells, a new Detroit Police headquarters, offices for the Wayne County Prosecutor and county probation services, Friend of the Court and other local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies that choose to locate there.
Key to Ficano's concept is that Oakland, Macomb, and other nearby counties would agree to send their prisoners there for arraignment by closed-circuit video links rather than holding detainees in local lockups throughout southeastern Michigan.
"It would save them a lot of money because they wouldn't have to expand brick and mortar in their own locations. It's economies of scale," Ficano said.
Because site selection for major public projects tends to provoke controversy, the task force limits its list of potential sites to those already controlled by government or those easily obtained.
Besides the city-owned airport and stadium and the privately owned train station, the task force also lists as possible sites the former Chrysler headquarters in Highland Park, a large parcel of vacant land south of Jefferson Avenue at St. Jean, the site of the historic Packard factory on Detroit's near-east side and the river side of Waterworks Park on the eastern riverfront.
Although not mentioned in the report, another potential site could have opened up last month when Greektown Casino announced it would not build a larger casino at a site near Gratiot and I-375 near the existing Frank Murphy Hall of Justice.
Instead, the casino plans to expand near its current site in Greektown.
That decision apparently came too late for the site near I-375 to be included in the task force's report. But given its proximity to the current justice campus, it might be included in future studies, Ficano said.
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