Now that the former Duracell plant is off the table as a site for the new jail, Davidson County officials are looking at other possibilities.
Commissioners had voted to move ahead with the Duracell plant but changed their minds during a closed-door session last month after learning that a deed restriction would prohibit the site from being used for "residential purposes." The county's jail committee had recommended the Duracell site.
Officials are considering six sites -- an expansion of the existing jail on West Center Street, a site off U.S. 64, the Lexington Home Brands Plant 1, the Stanley Furniture plant on West Center Street, Davidson County Day School on West Center Street Extension, and a property known as the Range site. Officials did not say where the Range site is.
The city of Lexington bought the Lexington Home Brands Plant two years ago, and the Stanley Furniture Plant closed last year. The Davidson County Day School is abandoning its campus and looking for another site.
The county's jail committee met Friday for the first time since the commissioners rejected its recommendation.
Brian Shipwash, a member of the committee who is also the Davidson County Clerk of Court, strongly criticized Ware Bonsall Architects of Charlotte, which recommended the Duracell site. He said that the company did a shoddy job of evaluating the site and gave a flawed analysis of jail population trends.
"We didn't explore how we made a quarter of a million dollar mistake," he said, referring to the more than $200,000 that the county has paid the firm.
That got a sharp rebuke from County Manager Robert Hyatt.
"To say a quarter-of-a-million-dollar mistake is not a fair assessment of what's taken place," he said.
But many committee members agreed that Ware Bonsall should have flagged the deed restriction much earlier in the process.
Glenn Ware, the president of Ware Bonsall Architects, could not be reached immediately for comment Friday.
The Duracell plant has been a source of controversy for years because of contamination on the site. In 1981, state environmental regulators discovered that mercury had been contaminating the land around the plant since the 1960s and had leaked into nearby Abbots Creek, a tributary of High Rock Lake. The state banned the eating of fish from the lake for 10 years.
Duracell reached an agreement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2003 to deal with the contamination, and the EPA continues to monitor the site.
County officials had been considering using what used to be Ames Department Store before Duracell bought it in the 1970s and used it for storage and shipping.
Shipwash, who had strongly opposed the Duracell plant, said that there was misinformation about the existing jail site. He said it was made to sound as if the county would have to force out 31 families.
"The downtown site was made to look like Three Mile Island compared to the Duracell site," he said, referring to the 1979 accident at a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania.
Fred McClure, another committee member and the chairman of the commissioners, said that was never the case.
Shipwash suggested that the committee look at the Davidson County Day School site for new space for the Davidson County Sheriff's Office. He said that the committee should consider the needs of the sheriff's office and the jail as separate issues. He said the sheriff's office is severely overcrowded and that issue needs to be dealt with quickly.
Sheriff David Grice said he had no problems with that site but also asked the committee to consider about 70 acres around the property that could be used for a new jail.
Hyatt said that the committee is likely to narrow the six sites down and recommend something to the commissioners. But the Duracell plant shouldn't remain abandoned, committee members said.
"It needs to be sold to somebody for something," Commissioner Sam Watford said.
■ Michael Hewlett can be reached at 727-7326 or at mhewlett@wsjournal.com.
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