BUT COMMISSIONER SAYS COUNTY WON’T POST CORRECTIONS
A county commissioner admits Platte County has distributed jail tax financial projections that contain errors, but added that he sees no reason to issue a corrected document.
The original projections were used as the basis for the county’s proposed half cent sales tax to be decided by voters in August.
Scott Fricker, presiding county commissioner, made those remarks in discussions following a jail tax public forum in Parkville on July 15. Fricker’s remarks were audio recorded by The Landmark as the newspaper approached him with questions at the conclusion of the forum.
At the Aug. 6 election, Platte County is proposing a half cent sales tax for 20 years for what would become a three-story 471-bed jail in Downtown Platte City. The proposed tax would raise $408 million for the jail construction and for operations. If passed by voters, it would be the largest tax increase in the history of Platte County.
“We made some mistakes in the model,” Fricker said.
Gordon Cook, a local financial consultant who has studied the county commission’s jail financial projections and has called the county’s model “unreliable and embarrassing,” engaged Fricker in a conversation about the county’s errors.
“Why don’t you fix them and put them on the website?” Cook asked.
“The thing is on the ballot. We don’t need a working model,” Fricker said.
Cook said Fricker’s stance in essence is to ask voters to approve the jail tax question based on financial projections that the county commission knows are inaccurate.
Fricker said he had his own projection model but said he is unwilling to share it with the public.
One of the notable errors is in the number of jail inmates used in calculation of some jail expenses. The county commission’s financial model uses inmate counts considerably higher than their own jail expert lists in his report to commissioners.
In some cases, the county commission’s financial model used inmate numbers that are as much as 59% higher than their jail expert predicts.
“I have fixed that in my personal model. The differential is five percent (in costs),” Fricker claimed, though he again declined to share what he called his personal document.
“But if you know the information that was provided by Wes (Minder, the county administrator) is not correct, then why doesn’t the county put out the correct information?” Cook responded.
Fricker was then questioned on materials he handed out prior to the forum, which he claimed were personal materials.
“It’s not county material, I created it,” Fricker said.
“You handed it out, it’s county material. It’s now public information. You handed it out to the public,” Cook said.
“I’m here tonight as Scott Fricker,” Fricker said.
“No, you’re not. You are here as a commissioner. I’m sorry. You handed this out and then you went over it as a commissioner,” Cook said.
“This is a free speech issue. I can say what I want, I can hand out whatever I want, it’s not county material,” Fricker said.
Some of the county’s erroneous financial projections calculated expenses such as inmate medical costs using inmate numbers that are nowhere close to the projected number of inmates established by the county’s jail consultant, Bill Garnos.
Fricker said there is a 2024 Garnos update, which he said was on the commission’s website. But a review of that Garnos update in January 2024 compared to the Garnos October 2023 document reveals there are no differences in the two reports between the jail capacity requirements projected by the jail expert.
“This begs the continuing question of why the commission’s financial projection showed 480 inmates in the year 2036 and thereafter. It is next to impossible to overlook this discrepancy,” Cook said this week.
INMATE PROJECTION
DISCREPANCIES
County officials say if approved by voters, the first full year of operation in the new jail would be 2028. Following is a list of many of the overstated inmate projections in the county commission’s financial plan. These numbers are direct from the publicly-distributed county commission pro forma document. The difference between the county commission’s projected inmate numbers and the numbers projected by their jail expert starts out relatively small but quickly gets extreme.
2029: County commission lists 262 inmates, their jail expert projects 246.
2030: 288 to the jail expert’s 254.
2031: 317 to the expert’s 262.
2032: 348 to the expert’s 270.
2033: 383 to the expert’s 278.
2034: 422 to the expert’s 286.
2035: 464 to the expert’s 294.
2036: 480 to the expert’s 302.
The capacity of the proposed new jail is 471, so according to the county commission’s numbers the new jail would already be over capacity in 2036, only eight years after its opening. The jail expert lists Platte County’s inmate projection at 178 inmates fewer than the county commission’s model in that year.
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