MATTAWA — Grant County Sheriff Joey Kriete said the new Grant County Jail is projected to open in about 18 months.

“They’re still targeting for the opening of May of 2026,” Kriete said. “It felt like it was going to be so long when we started, but here we are. We’re getting close.”

Kriete gave an update on the project’s progress at a Jan. 9 luncheon sponsored by the South Grant County Chamber of Commerce in recognition of National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day.

The new jail will hold 512 inmates, more than double the existing jail.

“It’s going to be huge – and I will tell you, that thing is becoming a structure. Now there are rooms in there. I need a road map to get through it now,” Kriete said.

"The walls are up; they’re now becoming rooms. Roofs are going on. The two housing pods are fully erected. They've now poured concrete inside (where) the control room is going to be – it’s just going really quick,” he added.

The existing jail originally opened in 1986 and was reconfigured in the mid-1990s, which meant, among other things, repurposing some existing rooms.

“We doubled up some bunks. We took out day recreation areas, made them dorm areas. We had large storage areas – they're no longer storage areas, they’re dorms. We had to get really creative to double the population of the facility, which we were able to do,” he said.

The existing facility is too small for Grant County’s current circumstances, however, and that’s had an impact on law enforcement.

“The square footage is the square footage where the jail is built, and we stretched it out to the maximum we could,” Kriete said. “We knew that we had a substantial problem with our ability to keep people in custody and actually arrest people. We had jail restrictions on constantly, but we had a county that was growing so quickly. We just couldn’t keep up.”

The new facility will have more room for people who must be monitored, Kriete said.

“We have a lot more holding areas, which tends to be our bottleneck in our current jail,” he said. “We only have three holding areas, and if you get people in there with opiate withdrawal problems, you have to be able to see them constantly, it’s very difficult to do in areas other than the holding cells. So when you plug up those three holding cells, you can’t bring anybody else in that needs to come into a holding situation unless it’s a felony.”

The new jail will have 16 holding cells, Kriete said, and two group holding areas.

“We’ll have booking and release of inmates in separate areas,” he said. “We’ll have an extensive infirmary and behavioral health area that’s completely separate from what we have right now. So right now, if we have a behavioral health or infirmary issue within the facility, it plugs up our holding area. So now we can funnel these inmates that need to have that specific care to be able to be taken care of.”

In answer to a question, Kriete said more people who are arrested will be able to be booked into jail, but that ultimately the disposition of an inmate depends on the circumstances of the case.

“We will have room to book those people that we typically have to deny because of a lack of space,” he said.

Kriete was asked about housing prisoners from outside Grant County. He said county officials can and do have contracts to house inmates from other jurisdictions when room is available at the jail. That’s a bigger possibility with the new jail.

“We’re going to make sure we can take care of our people first before we start opening up for anybody else,” Kriete said.

Once it’s finished Grant County residents will get a chance to tour it before it opens, he said. There’s also another idea under consideration.

Jail staff will have to do some training in the new facility, he said, and he’s thinking of asking volunteers from the community to play the part of inmates.

“It gives our employees time to go through the process, see how things are, how efficient things are going to be,” he said. “It’ll be kind of fun and get the community involved, be able to see what the facility’s like inside.”

    Construction workers on the site of the new Grant County Jail in late October. The jail is expected to open in about 18 months.
  

    Workers place a beam in the skeleton of the new Grant County Jail in October. Grant County Sheriff Joey Kriete said last week that construction is going at a rapid clip.