Parts 1 and 2 of the three-part story of the Cloud County Law Enforcement Center and its jail recounted the facility’s origins and the tumultuous period that followed its opening throughout the 2010s. This week’s edition focuses on the facility’s recent history up to its current status.
By 2018, jail facility employees knew something wasn’t right with the building, but it wouldn’t be until Ken Davis was elected sheriff in 2021 that the jail would see extensive repairs.
In 2020, Campbell and Johnson Engineers found that the building required roof repairs, new insulation, entire wall panels removed and reinsulated, roof alterations to provide better drainage and a complete replacement of the center’s HVAC system.
“There was condensation rotting the ceiling tiles, and they were falling to the floor, and it was causing mold in the walls; it was just horrible,” said Cloud County Sheriff Ken Davis during an interview with Blade-Empire staff on Wednesday, Jan. 21.
Initially, according to commissioner meeting minutes, when the county published the contract work for the center’s repairs, they received no bids. This led commissioners to ask Campbell and Johnson to acquire construction work for the project, which they found in Clyde’s Budreau Construction, Inc.
These have been called the facility’s remedial repairs, with the first order for construction totaling $944,064, which was within the original cost estimate range set by the county.
“The commissioners at the time… they all worked well and got the plan together, and we ended up moving to the courthouse while they did the rebuild,” Davis said.
The commission approved this contract work with Budreau Construction in mid-July of 2021, and as the remedial repairs became more extensive, the county decided to house its inmates in neighboring counties until the jail reopened.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic swept across America. Sheriff Davis said that within five months, the Kansas Department of Corrections (KDOC) had paroled many low-threat inmates due to COVID-19 restrictions.
According to Davis, not only did these restrictions cause jails and prisons to clear out across the state, but they also caused the entire justice system to slow. Those working at the Law Enforcement Center wouldn’t see these impacts until after contractors completed the jail’s remedial repairs.
While both of these challenges hit the jail simultaneously, the county tackled the one issue it could control: the jail’s repairs. After eight change orders from the original $900,000 cost, the repairs cost a total of more than $3 million.
From the beginning, the county aimed to keep its population of inmates within the jail during these repairs, only moving inmates from room to room as repairs crawled along the facility. According to Davis, he and his team couldn’t find a feasible solution to accomplish this and decided to pivot.
As stated earlier, the county began remedial repairs on the jail in July 2021. After attempting to shuffle inmates around the jail for a few months as repairs began, the sheriff and his staff recognized it wouldn’t be feasible to continue this practice safely. According to Davis, the Cloud County Law Enforcement Center moved its inmates to other jurisdictions in November 2021.
Nine months later, Cloud County inmates moved back when the jail facility reopened with a temporary certificate of occupancy in July 2022 while waiting on a new smoke control system.
Davis said that everyone moved back into the jail after the initial certificate of occupancy, but an expired Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) certificate caused the last hurdle before Cloud County began full operations once more.
“When we moved back into the jail after the refit was done, the state brought us inmates again,” Davis said. “Then, they contacted us and said, ‘Hey, we think your PREA certification just ran out.’ It ran out in October, and I think we moved back in September.”
Davis said that the jail administrator and his sergeant worked diligently to recertify the facility and completed the requirements only a month later. The smoke control system was activated at the end of March 2023, and a formal certificate of occupancy was signed on April 3, 2023.
Even though the law enforcement center’s operations returned to normal, the inmate count never climbed back to the average population numbers of before COVID-19 restrictions. Davis said this was largely due to the aforementioned justice system slowdown due to the pandemic restrictions.
“Nobody was having court; they couldn’t figure out how they were going to do court,” Davis said. “So people weren’t getting sentenced and going to prison, but yet, people were still getting out of prison, so they had a bunch of open beds over the three- or four-year period.”
Beds remained empty. Yet, this was supposed to be the main benefit for the county in build a jail this size: profit from housing KDOC and out-of-county inmates.
Each time a local government, whether it be city, county or state, has more inmates than it has facilities, it will contract with other municipalities that have open beds for a fee paid to the holding municipality. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, a few large municipalities were repeat customers at the Cloud County Law Enforcement Center, but that changed when those municipalities made their own changes.
Davis said that while COVID-19 restrictions lifted, Sedgwick County Law Enforcement opened up an additional wing of its jail facility, while Saline County Law Enforcement opened its new jail facility at the end of 2023.
According to Davis, when the jail was full, he employed 17 corrections officers to safely maintain security throughout the facility. With the inmate population drastically reduced, Davis decided to cut the staff from 17 to 13 corrections officers.
“I chose to cut down the total amount of employees from 17 to 13 while we’re waiting to start trying to house again. I was trying to save the taxpayers some money,” Davis said. “To safely run the jail, I’d have to have a minimum of at least 10 (corrections officers), but with 10, that’s nobody taking vacations or anything like that, which is not fair.”
Right in the middle of the holidays in 2025, Davis said that four of the remaining corrections officers quit due to personal reasons, leaving the center with only nine corrections officers. This led Davis to a difficult decision: continue running the jail with a skeleton crew or close the jail and wait for new hires to fill out the rest of the employee roster.
“I cannot, in good conscience, leave this jail running unsafely,” Davis said. “I have one young lady who worked 133 hours in a two-week period, and I’m like, ‘We can’t keep doing this.’ So, that’s why I made the decision (to temporarily close).”
Currently, the jail continues to host only minimal operations, including intake and other required paperwork before sending inmates to be housed at other facilities, which Cloud County must pay for. County staff continues to recruit new corrections officers and facilitate training.
Even though some corrections officers have left, Davis said there’s a “core group” of officers who are dedicated to a career in corrections. Davis said he’s deeply thankful to have this group during tumultuous periods.
Davis said while conducting this hiring and training process, he intends to focus on best preparing his new hires for their difficult job duties.
“I’m definitely confident that if we get a good group going… we’ll open back up, no problem,” Davis said. “We’ll continue to run like we always have, and I’m hoping that happens soon, but I’m not going to do it half-heartedly.”
As of the publication of this article, there is still no set timeline for the jail to resume housing inmates.
