Monroe County Council members Jennifer Crossley, Kate Wiltz and Peter Iversen at the first Justice Fiscal Advisory Committee Monday. (Lucas Gonzalez, WFIU/WTIU News)
(Lucas Gonzalez, WFIU/WTIU News)
The work of a committee formed to give fiscal recommendations on a new Monroe County Jail is officially underway.
While CJRC meetings were more comprehensive in scope, the JFAC will focus primarily on identifying budget priorities for a new facility. It will then make recommendations for the Monroe County Council to vote on.
County council member Peter Iversen, who chaired the Monday JFAC meeting, said the group’s work will be highly time sensitive.
“We wanted to make sure that as the county council is thinking about next year’s budget that they were also going to have this data available to them — these recommendations,” Iversen said. “This is a really big project, and it’s going to have a lot of costs to it for the public. We want to make sure that we’re being good stewards of the public’s funds.”
The group’s first meeting was largely procedural and covered subjects such as when meetings will be noticed and how they’ll be led, when the group will convene and which stakeholders to consult on various objectives.
The new group consists of three voting members — county council members Iversen, Jennifer Crossley, and Kate Wiltz — who will take turns chairing the meetings, and more than a dozen non-voting members, including:
An individual with lived experience incarcerated at the Monroe County Jail
A criminal judge
A civil judge
A prosecutor’s office representative
A public defender’s office representative
A sheriff’s office representative
A community behavioral health center representative
A Bloomington Police Department representative
A Monroe County Health Department harm reduction specialist
One of three county commissioners
A City of Bloomington Family Resource Department representative
Iversen, Crossley and Wiltz will ask department heads to name representatives to serve as non-voting committee members. The group of three will then approve recommended non-voting members.
It’s unclear exactly how persons with lived experience will be selected to participate.
Although none of the non-voting members are required to attend JFAC meetings for the committee to function, Iversen said they were included because the county council wanted the group to have broad community representation.
Iversen said JFAC membership was modeled at least partially after that of the CJRC, which consists of all three county commissioners, three county council members, two representatives from the board of judges, and representatives from the sheriff’s office, public defender’s office and prosecutor’s office.
Not included on the CJRC, however, is a member of Bloomington City Council or the mayor’s administration — something city officials have spoken out against.
Crossley said she felt progress on community justice reform has been somewhat “in limbo” since CJRC meetings were suspended.
“I don’t think anybody is satisfied, whether you agree that the suspension was good or if it was a bad idea,” Crossley said. “For me, there’s always been room for progress. There’s always room for growth and improvement; and in my mind, that’s where we are now.”
Wiltz said she sees the new committee as one created not in lieu of the CJRC, but as one necessary for the county council to fulfill its duties as the county’s fiscal body.
“Our approach is a little bit different than the way the CJRC was going,” Wiltz said. “I think this is just one piece of a lot of different things going on to inform our whole system. We’re trying to take a broad look so that we’re not focused just on a building or a site, but we’re looking across all of the fiscal impact from all the systematic changes.”
The committee is expected to make recommendations to the county council by September and complete its duties no later than December. Any time extension for the committee to complete its duties would have to be approved by the council.
