With the purchase of the former Walmart building off the table as a potential site for a bigger county jail, Flathead County officials are scoping out other options to increase the number of jail beds.

One possibility for a new jail is the former Kalispell Feed & Grain property that is owned by the county. The county acquired the 14-acre parcel on the west side of U.S. 93 south of Kalispell through a tax deed in 2006. The county has been leasing various facilities on the property through the years, generating more than $400,000 in income, Flathead County Administrator Mike Pence said.

The county used a federal Brownfields grant through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to complete an environmental assessment of the former grain elevator site, and it has a clean bill of health environmentally, Pence said. Located where the railroad tracks once crossed the highway, the property would have room for future expansion and is largely removed from residential neighborhoods.

The Walmart property in Evergreen is still a possibility for a jail site, if another party’s offer to buy the building were to fall through, Pence said. The county had a tentative deal to buy the 14-acre Walmart site and building but was sidelined by a higher offer from an undisclosed national firm.

“We’re not writing it off completely until the deal [with the high bidder] has closed,” Pence said. “But we’re not going to sit around wondering what’s going to happen to Walmart. We have to assume it’s off the table.

“If Walmart is completely out of the picture we probably need to do a PAR (professional architectural review) and a site selection analysis on a couple of sites” including private and public properties, Pence said.

The county had offered to buy the Walmart site for $2.8 million. Appraisals on the site, owned by RIC Kalispell Trust, of Brooklyn, New York, have ranged from $3.1 million to $3.6 million.

Expansion of the existing county jail in the Justice Center also is an option, but the county is land-locked there, Pence said. The county could add another 100 beds to the jail, but in the coming decades when more space would be needed, the county would be forced to look elsewhere for space, he said.

The current jail was built in 1985 for a maximum of 63 prisoners, and over the years capacity has been maximized by double-bunking prisoners. Today the jail can accommodate just over 100 prisoners, depending on the mix of violent felons, women and other offenders. Sheriff Chuck Curry has estimated the county jail should have about 200 beds.

At a Tuesday community meeting, Curry said jail overcrowding has reached a “crisis” level. Full jail capacity is 107 people and last week the jail set a new record for capacity with 119 inmates housed, according to Curry. Most of the time the only people who end up spending the night in jail are felons, Curry said.

Regardless of what level the jail is at as far as capacity, Curry makes a point to detain people who are a threat to the community for as long as possible.

“We aren’t turning away the dangerous people,” Curry said.

The jail roster has been running about 90 percent felons, more than double the percentage of felons that should be in the jail.

This week Curry plans to announce new plans to free up to 10 percent of the jail’s capacity.

The county likely would need voter approval for a bond issue to pay for an expanded jail, but a year ago the county commissioners approved a new funding concept that will generate about $10 million over the next six years to pay for jail expansion.

During the recession a few years ago the county opted not to levy the maximum number of mills allowed by law, to soften the tax burden for county residents. At the same time the county began a cost-saving initiative, asking departments to hold the line on spending and freezing pay raises for a time. The county now is reclaiming those mills from past years and earmarking them for capital improvements for the adult detention facility.

That set-aside likely won’t be enough to fully pay for jail expansion, but would drastically reduce the amount of additional money needed for the expansion, Pence said.

(Reporter Megan Strickland contributed to this story.)

Features Editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.