News
Meigs County Jail Levy Fails
By: Bethany Greenman, Micaela Marshall
Posted on:
After 121 years, the Meigs County Sheriff’s Office and jail will remain as is.
The results are in and 3,189 voted against and 2,417 voted for the Meigs Co. Criminal Justice and Sheriffs Facilities Bond Issue and Levy.
County Commissioners and the Sheriff’s Office have worked for over four years to come up with a plan to build a new $9 million correctional facility for the county. If the levy passed, the new facility would have incorporated several recovery and addiction programs to combat the opioid epidemic.
“People made their voice tonight of how they feel on where they want law enforcement to go in the community. We need to stay the course that we’re at right now unless we can come up with something better from what we offered in this the plan, but we worked for about four and a half years on this project to put together the plan and it had a lot of built in good features to it, as jobs and revenue to bring back the county and the recovery programs. It’s more disappointing to me that we’re not gonna be able to maybe capitalize on that, we really need to focus on the drug problem in the community,” said Sheriff Wood.
As of now, the jail will continue to operate the same way it has been: only five cells available for inmates and deputies spending time off county roads, transporting inmates to other counties.
Sheriff Keith Wood is disappointed by the results, but hopeful for the future.
“I’m just trying to absorb what happened and still look at it as a positive. And there’s a lot of people that supported it. And there’s probably a lot of people on the other side that didn’t support it, maybe they didn’t understand. So, those six or seven hundred people that I gotta’ get back my way and support it to get it over the hump. I mean, that’s what we gotta’ do. So we try, we just try harder,” said Sheriff Wood.