1 Union Ave. Lock-Up Set To Close

Starting July 1 people arrested in New Haven will not be held in the prisoner lock-up next to the police station at 1 Union Ave. They will probably head to a new holding center at the jail on Whalley Avenue.

That’s because the lock-up at police HQ is slated to close.

Like other state services, the lock-up, which the state runs, has fallen victim to budget cuts, according to Assistant Chief Anthony Campbell. And New Haven didn’t have the money to pick up the cost to keep it running.

The city was notified April 14 that Gov. Dannel P. Malloy would cut funding to judicial branches as part of efforts to close a $930 million state budget gap. To minimize layoffs among judicial marshals, the decision was made to shut down some detention centers around the state, including the one located at the New Haven Police Department, Campbell said.

Campbell, who oversees the department’s administrative bureau, handles many of the day-to-day operations at police headquarters. He said initially there was some thought that state Department of Corrections officers could staff the lock-up, but when it was determined that that wasn’t going to happen he started looking at what it might take for the police department to staff it.

He said it would have required a supervisor and three officers for each shift. Given the department’s own shortages, such staffing likely would have been impossible. It also was unclear whether the judicial marshals would be leaving their equipment behind for such tasks as video monitoring.

“And we also would have had to figure out how we would feed them,” Campbell said of the prisoners. ​“That would be our responsibility also. When you think about it, it starts adding up quickly.”

Chief Dean Esserman reached out to DOC Commissioner Scott Semple and Mike Lawlor, undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning, and ultimately negotiated an agreement for corrections to take New Haven prisoners at the Whalley Avenue detention center. The police department will provide an officer to handle processing prisoners, which is the current arrangement at 1 Union Ave., and a non-uniformed records clerk. Both would have to work out of the Whalley Avenue center instead of at police headquarters.

Campbell said if negotiations with the police union and Local 884 go smoothly, the change won’t have any fiscal impact on the city’s budget. Because the officer and the clerk would be working out of a different location, it could be considered a change of work conditions for both positions. The police union has already expressed some discomfort with having an unarmed officer handling the processing. Campbell said a meeting with union officials is slated for Monday morning.

He called the closing of the lock-up a done deal: ​“There’s no going back on that.” He said the order removing the judicial marshals from 1 Union Ave. and effectively closing the lock-up also rescinds a 1993 letter to then-Mayor John Daniels that created the arrangement in the first place.

That back story appeared largely unknown to the Board of Alders Wednesday night when the subject arose during a Finance Committee hearing on the $523.3 million upcoming fiscal year budget. Annex Alder Alphonse Paolillo Jr. peppered city budget chief Joe Clerkin about the status of the lock-up and whether the city had any kind of financial contingency for operating the current lock-up should the Whalley Avenue detention center not be prepared to start accepting prisoners by July 1.

Clerkin showed up to discuss the mayor’s proposed plans to close a last minute $4.6 million shortfall in the budget. Paolillo expressed concern that the Harp administration had entered into an agreement, with the lock-up, that might have fiscal consequences for the city that are not taken into account in the revised budget.

Clerkin had few answers regarding the lock-up, except for his contention that there are no contingency funds for absorbing the operation of the 1 Union Ave. lock-up if for some reason the Whalley Avenue detention center decided it could not take prisoners.

He produced a brief email from Police Chief Dean Esserman answering questions that Paolillo had apparently posed at a meeting between alder leadership and the administration the evening before. In the email, Esserman indicated that the mayor had been notified on April 14 about the decision to stop staffing the 1 Union Ave. lock-up, and she notified him. Since that time police officials had been working with Lawlor and the DOC.

“Our Union was notified, as well as Command Staff and an announcement at Compstat,” the weekly data-sharing meeting at police headquarters, Esserman wrote. ​“We are planning to close the facility with the Judicial Branch on July 1 and bring arrested prisoners to the Whalley Ave. Facility. We are scheduling a sit down with our Union next week.”

Assistant Chief Al Vazquez will handle the negotiations. Vazquez (who is retiring next month) oversees the patrol division, where the officer works who will process detainees.

Paolillo expressed frustration that the administration had not communicated about the closing of the lock-up even though it had learned about that possibility almost a month ago, and now that alders do know about it, more details have not been more forthcoming.

“It’s nice that it’s announced a Compstat, but the budget is not approved at Compstat,” Paolillo said. ​“It’s approved at 165 Church St. I’m not sure how this passes as an ample explanation on a service that is being provided every day, that the judicial branch probably has a staff of 25 on a day-to-day basis working in and out of detention. If we can’t go to Whalley Avenue, we would have to run [the lock-up] ourselves, and I’m not sure if we even have the capacity to run ourselves right now.”

He asked Clerkin to comb through the budget for any other agreements or memoranda of understanding (MOU) such as the lock-up agreement and an agreement between the city and AFSCME Local 3144 over a grantwriting position in the police department that might create a budgetary headache for alders as they try to make sense of the budget. The grantwriting position was removed from the proposed city budget and then added back based on reading of a MOU that has been renewed multiple times between the city and Local 3144 going all the way back to June 2014.

Finance Committee alders will deliberate and offer amendments to the budget at a 5:30 meeting Monday that will take place prior to their scheduled committee of the whole meeting.