SAN ANTONIO — A longstanding practice of housing hundreds of federal inmates set to move to the Bexar County Jail from a downtown detention center may soon end.
On Tuesday county commissioners agreed to consider ending an agreement they have with the federal government to house federal inmates in the old Laredo Street facility.
Bexar County officials plan to start clearing the land where the Central Texas Detention Center sits to make way for UTSA construction projects.
It's part of the reason why the county reached a resolution to discuss terminating the agreement they have with the federal government; an agreement that includes a deal to transfer detainees to the Bexar County Jail Complex.
The downtown detention center houses more than 600 federal inmates.
"Some of them are being held for trial, some of them they are transferring, some of them are immigration violations," said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said.
GEO, a private corporation, runs the jail for the feds, but the building is owned by Bexar County.
"Our prisoner levels have gone up, so we just decided that we wanted to get out of the business," Wolff said.
According to him, when the agreement was initially made the jail had enough room to take inmates. However, over the years the number of detainees has increased.
"We had a bump and it seems to be holding around 4,200," Wolff said. "So it's beginning to challenge us on jail capacity."
For years the plan was to renovate the Adult Detention Center Annex to house the federal detainees so the Laredo Street jail could be torn down.
"I know if we were to go with GEO out there it would cost tax payers like $12 million and we don't want to do that," Wolff said.
The current plan is to demolish the GEO run jail to make room for the UTSA project.
"We want to get out of it to build a UTSA campus there,” Wolff said. “On that we will build a business school, adjacent will be a school of data science, on the side will be a cyber security. We put a lot of money into the creek there on that section."
As for what will happen to the inmates, that remains unclear.
"We will work with the U.S. Marshals office to see what would be an orderly transition," Wolff said.
The resolution reached by county commissioners gives the federal government 30 days to get discussions underway and figure out where the detainees will be moved.