Bids for the long-awaited project, which will built next to the county’s Fire Training Facility just off Howes Cave Road in the Town of Schoharie, were awarded in April.
It’s replacing the county’s old jail in the Village of Schoharie, inoperable since Irene ravaged the Valley in August 2011 and is expected to open for business in 2020.
In addition to room for 68 prisoners, the jail will also house the Sheriff’s Department, District Attorney’s Office, and Probation Department and include space for some of the county’s essential services in the event of another Irene-like disaster.
County Treasurer Bill Cherry is the county’s Flood Recovery coordinator and he sees Friday’s event as a way to celebrate the end of an often-grueling process and thank some of those involved.
“It’s really my first groundbreaking, with hard hats and gold shovels and everything,” Mr. Cherry said.
But he’s doing it all in style.
In addition to a cake decorated with a layout of the new jail, Mr. Cherry’s invited a slew of federal and state officials, including some of those who helped secure—finally—FEMA funding for a new jail.
Local officials will also be in the crowd—in fact, everyone’s invited.
“It’s really as much a demarcation of all the preparation and planning and applying for permits that went before and what comes next,” Mr. Cherry said.
“And that will be a new jail, out of the floodplain,” 80-85 percent of it paid for by the state and federal governments.
The groundbreaking will be especially meaningful, Mr. Cherry said, when considered against all of the hurdles the county was up against rebuilding it.
First, FEMA insisted the jail be rebuilt where it sat—in a flood plain—something the state said it would refuse to fund.
After appeals that went all the way to Washington, DC, FEMA finally relented and said the jail could be moved.
Then, after studying and considering a half-dozen sites, supervisors settled on the old Seebold farm on Route 30.
But after tests, water studies, $200,000 and a year’s worth of work showed there was no way to place the facility on the property without impacting neighbors’ wells and driving up the cost of the project significantly, supervisors had to abandon that plan, putting them back at square one.
It was just luck, Mr. Cherry said, that the property next to the Fire Training Facility became available when it did.
“It’s been seven long years,” he said. “To finally see the light at the end of the tunnel after so many false starts is a great feeling. It’s a major milestone for us and it’s a perfect fit.”
Among those Mr. Cherry hopes he’ll especially have a chance to thank at Friday’s ceremony: Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, Congressman John Faso, Governor Andrew Cuomo, State Senator Jim Seward, and former Assemblyman Pete Lopez and his replacement, Assemblyman and former Schoharie supervisor Chris Tague.