BELLOWS FALLS — Let it first be said that a more holistic, comprehensive approach toward treating nonviolent offenders is a great idea. One also applauds the progressive vision for law enforcement from our county sheriff. And the idea of rehabbing a 10-years-dead-and-gone mill on the banks of the Connecticut River is wonderful.
However, as a citizen of Rockingham, where the ironically named Liberty Mill Justice Center is proposed, one might be forgiven for wanting to look beneath the hood a bit.
There are two issues at hand: one is the need for a more humane and effective justice system. The other is the residents' need to be assured that the siting of the center in their community is to their benefit.
The problem that many residents feel is that the builders and salespeople of the proposed facility have approached the whole project with an almost Nixonian sense of secrecy. To date, details provided the citizens of Rockingham have been sketchy.
Exactly who the players are is a tad unclear. The enigmatic (private) Bellows Falls Area Development Corporation (BFADC), piloted by the Rockingham Development Director (whose salary is paid by town taxpayers), is involved. So is an outside (for profit) developer. So is the (elected) Windham County sheriff, whose every activity is an odd mishmash of public and private. (That's not the sheriff's fault; it's the Byzantine system of sheriff's departments themselves).
And one has a creeping perception that the citizenry has been deliberately kept at arm's length until the players feel the project is far enough down the rails that the whole thing is unstoppable.
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At the presentation that the sheriff made to the Rockingham Selectboard and Bellows Falls Village Trustees, facts seemed to be on the fungible side.
There was a fine PowerPoint presentation, with an occasional hard fact poking through a porridge of buzzwords. Payments to the town were mentioned, with malleable figures attached, but after seven years, the crystal ball - glowingly employed to project favorable detainee outcomes - went dark. The number of prisoner beds - one of the hard facts that showed up maybe two-thirds of the way down the list of activities anticipated for the site - seemed to rise, yet again, from the previous projections.
Here are a few - I believe indisputable - facts:
• The facility needs to house prisoner beds in order to generate revenue to operate.
• The sheriff hopes that detainees will go back to whence they came once they graduate. Ongoing treatment options, however, will be offered to the former clients, so it is not at all illogical to think that former detainees might settle nearby.
• Disadvantaged populations tend to have more special-needs kids.
• Special education is extraordinarily expensive.
• The town of Rockingham will get payments between $100,000 and $200,000 a year for seven years. After that, the whole thing might become a nonprofit and evaporate from the tax roles.
• As far as we have been told, there is nothing baked into the DNA of the facility to prevent all the progressive aspects from being declared a failure down the road, and having the whole thing just become a jail.
• The sheriff is an elected position, and the current office holder - with his progressive outlook - could be swept out of office and replaced with a highly regressive successor.
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To reiterate, I'm not - at all - inherently opposed to the proposal. But, to date, the air of secrecy and the aura of inevitability mingled with the miasma of happy-talk surrounding the few available facts makes one's Spidey-senses tingle.
I remain hopeful that sufficient, tangible safeguards can be put in place to ensure long-term benefits to both the tax rolls and the citizenry of Rockingham.
But the ball is certainly in the Sheriff and BFADC's court. We'll see if they can field it.