City officials in Littlefield have big hopes for tomorrow morning’s auction, where a minimum bid of $5 million could be enough to buy your own little slice of Panhandle heaven: the 383-bed Bill Clayton Detention Center.

It’s being billed as a “turn-key medium security detention center,” a 383-bed bargain with slick promotions courtesy the Williams and Williams Worldwide Real Estate Auction house.

The 11-year-old prison was refurbished in 2005, and looks great in the slideshows and teaser trailers produced for the auction. (Here’s a longer video tour, but scroll down for a look at the best one, a “Battlestar Galactica” inspired tour, all quick cuts and drums.)

For the City of Littlefield, though, the prison’s last couple years haven’t been such a thrill ride.

The town paid for the prison with a $10 million bond issue, planning for a bright future with the Texas Youth Commission. But after TYC pulled pulled its charges from the facility in 2003, Littlefield’s credit rating suffered as the South Florida-based private prison giant GEO Group shopped around the country for inmates to fill its beds — first with Wyoming’s, then with Idaho’s Department of Corrections.

Idaho pulled its prisoners in 2008, GEO Group after them, and the town’s been stuck with the empty prison it hasn’t finished paying for. Now it’s raising taxes and fees on its 6,500 residents to make room for bond payments.

The empty prison is the driving force behind cuts to the city budget this year, according to a City Manager’s message in the budget:

The budget for 2010-2011 has presented new challenges for us since the debt payments for the Bill Clayton Detention Center (BCDC) have been pushed front and center by the lack of a source of prisoners to provide a revenue stream for those bond payments.

 

Earlier this week, The Bond Buyer looked at the Bill Clayton facility and a handful of others now sitting empty around Texas. While many towns found ways to avoid leaving taxpayers on the hook if operators left, that didn’t happen here:

Like many of the speculative detention centers built in sparsely populated counties, the Clayton facility was meant to be an economic stimulus instead of an economic drain. But Littlefield took the somewhat unusual step of pledging its full faith and credit to the bonds.

 

City officials were either on vacation or didn’t reply to interview requests from the Independent.

The advocacy group Grassroots Leadership has made a case study of Bill Clayton, warning of the hidden dangers private prisons can create for a town, and folks with the group say Texas’ shrinking prison population doesn’t tell the half of the Littlefield story.

“This was like a soap opera,” said Grassroots Leadership executive director Donna Red Wing, recalling a 2004 prison break police said was aided by a pair of guards, and a 2008 suicide that sparked a suit against GEO Group from the family of the inmate, alleging he’d been left in solitary for more than a year.

“You couldn’t make this stuff up, the stories are horrible,” Red Wing said. “If you wrote that screenplay, they wouldn’t take it.”

When the Idaho DOC left the Clayton facility in 2008, state Correction Director Brent Reinke said it was pulling out because of “an ongoing staffing issue,” the Associated Press reported at the time, referring to an Idaho audit that found guards had been falsifying reports of their inmate checks.

“Littlefield is a difficult place to have a facility. It’s a long way from an employment base,” said Grassroots Leadership’s Bob Libal, who edits the blog Texas Prison Bid’ness.

Libal said the Clayton facility was part of a much greater prison-building rush around Texas that ended around 2007, followed by national searches for inmates to fill them. The only growth lately, Libal said, has been in facilities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

A $35 million prison in Jones County was built by New Jersey-based Community Education Centers last summer, and now sits empty, as local TV station KTXS reported, “ready to bring nearly 200 jobs to the area.”

In that case, the county formed a Public Facility Corporation to help minimize the taxpayers’ liability — but Libal said it could still mean trouble for the county because its credit rating is still tied to the prison debt.

In January, Littlefield officials hoped the Texas Department of Criminal Justice would sign off on an application from Avalon Correctional Services to operate the prison, but nothing came of it. Now the city just wants it off the books, even at half of what they paid.

NPR featured both the Clayton facility and Jones County’s new prison back in March, before Littlefield had announced its auction:

“Too many times we’ve seen jails that have got into it and tried to make it a profitable business to make money off of it and they end up fallin’ on their face,” says Shannon Herklotz, assistant director of the [Texas Commission on Jail Standards].

 

The packages look sweet. A town gets a new detention center without costing the taxpayers anything. The private operator finances, constructs and operates an oversized facility. The contract inmates pay off the debt and generate extra revenue.

The economic model works fine until they can’t find inmates.

 

Update at 4:16 p.m.: Geoff Sills at Williams and Williams, who are handling the auction, returned a call from the Independent to say there’s been plenty of interest in the auction so far. “We have had quit a few phone calls and visits to the center since we’ve been marketing it. We’ll know a lot more when the auction begins,” Sills said. “I feel very strongly that the folks in Littlefield could use a little help with this.”