County looks to overhaul old jail

Commission approves proposal to survey offices for new uses

The opening of the new Walton County Jail left the Walton County Board of Commissioners with a new issue: what to do with the old one?

Chairman David Thompson is leading the way to try and repurpose the building for a new destiny.
“The office space is in good shape,” Thompson said Tuesday at the commission’s monthly board meeting. “The jail itself is not, but those offices could be used to house departments that are currently bursting at the seams.”

Thompson said the county is looking to move several current county departments to the old jail offices on South Madison Avenue in the future, either in part or as a whole, including the Board of Elections, the count’s Human Resources office, Walton County Fire Rescue and more.

With that in mind, the commission discussed a proposal from Precision Planning at Tuesday’s meeting to begin preliminary design services, including surveying the space, developing a conceptual site plan and lay the groundwork for the necessary renovations.

“Space will be required for customer service, waiting, offices, training, meeting, break, storage and miscellaneous support space,” the proposal reads. “It is expected that the original jail housing and jail support space will be demolished as the first phase of the project. The housing expansion constructed in the early 2000s will be repurposed for Elections and storage. The project is expected to include site improvements such as drives, secure staff parking, landscaping and potentially a pre-engineered EMS vehicle storage building.

Thompson said some of the jail space might be used for storage, but said there were no plans to use the former detention center for its old purpose.

“We’re not looking to lease our jail space,” Thompson said.

While much of the actual renovation work will be done by the county itself — “We’ll do as much as can in house,” Thompson said — the initial planning work by Precision Planning required a contract to get the ball rolling on the project.

“I’d like to get started,” Thompson said.

The commission ultimately agreed and the three attending members — Amarie Warren, Pete Myers and Timothy Shelnutt — along with Thompson voted to approve the $69,500 agreement with Precision Planning to get started.

Commissioners Kirklyn Dixon, Jeremy Adams and Lee Bradford were all absent Tuesday. The commission also looked at a proposal from TrueRoll, a company which reviews county’s homestead exemption rolls to find any ineligible exemptions and restore lost revenue to the government.

Thompson said there 24,000 parcels in Walton County which are currently on the rolls as receiving the homestead exemption, with the combined property values of those parcels reaching over a billion dollars. Those 24,000 parcels amount to more than $17 million in taxable value which Walton County does not receive due to the exemption.

Thompson emphasized he fully supports the homestead exemption, but wants to ensure that every parcel receiving the exemption is actually qualified for it.

TrueRoll’s estimate for a county the size of Walton County is that roughly 3% of parcels which currently have the homestead exemption are unqualified, or about 720 parcels. The actual exemption value of one of those parcels is estimated at $700, meaning the county could receive more than $500,000 in tax revenue if those unqualified homes were restored to the active tax rolls.

The commission voted to approve the contract with TrueRoll for $48,360 to begin an audit of the exemption rolls. In other commission news, Warren — who was appointed to the commission last fall to finish out the term of her late husband, Bo Warren, after his death from illness — announced she did not intent to run for another term but would finish out the current term this year