The prison in Burlington will shut down at the end of July, bringing a loss of 142 jobs in the small town on Colorado’s eastern plains and a devastating impact on the community’s tax-funded services, businesses and schools.
The closure “just quite frankly stinks for a small community like Burlington,” said Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, a Republican from Sterling and one of several Colorado leaders pledging to help Kit Carson County recover financially.
As prison populations have declined nationwide because of criminal justice reform, the number of inmates in Colorado’s 20 prisons also has decreased. Kit Carson Correctional Center, one of three private prisons in Colorado run by Corrections Corporation of America, will become the sixth prison in the state to shut down in the last decade. The Burlington facility now has about 400 inmates, despite a capacity to hold more than 1,400.
Employees of the prison were informed Thursday morning, said Burlington economic development director Rol Hudler, who called the impact of the closure “tremendous.” Hudler said town and county officials have been in discussions about the future of the prison for several weeks with Corrections Corporation of America and Gov. John Hickenlooper’s office.
“It wasn’t a total surprise,” Hudler said. “There is no question it was unprofitable for them. It had to be.”
Hickenlooper’s office said the governor has committed to help mitigate the economic impact of the prison closure. The legislature had budgeted $3 million extra for the next fiscal year, which begins Friday, in an attempt to keep the Burlington prison open. Hickenlooper wants to use the unspent funds to help the area recover from the loss of its largest employer besides a hog farm. It was the second bailout for CCA in recent years after lawmakers gave the company $9 million in 2012 to keep the Burlington facility open.
Kathy Green, Hickenlooper’s spokeswoman, said the state had been trying to keep the prison open as the number of Colorado and out-of-state prisoners has been declining. Idaho recently pulled their prisoners from the facility. But the prison company wanted a guarantee of a minimum number of inmates and a higher daily rate per inmate than Colorado was willing to pay to keep the prison open, state officials said.
Officials with Nashville-based CCA declined a request for an interview but said in an e-mail that the population of Kit Carson prison was in decline and that “state officials ultimately determined that the capacity was not needed.” The company will transfer Burlington workers to its other prisons or help them find jobs in the area, spokesman Jonathan Burns said.
The Colorado Department of Corrections’ contract with Burlington for the prison was set to expire at the end of June and recently was extended until the end of July. The prisoners at Kit Carson will be transferred to the two other CCA-operated prisons in Colorado, in Crowley and Bent counties.
Christie Donner, director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, called the closure “appropriate.”
“Prisons shouldn’t be used as economic development,” she said. “We cannot justify keeping people locked up so that a couple hundred people in Burlington can have a job. It’s unethical. It’s immoral to even think about that. We’ve got to have more sensible criminal justice policy than just mass incarceration.”
But the closure will hit hard in the small town, where the prison paid $1.2 million in property taxes to fund schools, the city and county. The prison is the town’s largest customer of electricity.
Community leaders said the closure will hurt everyone from landlords who rent to correctional officers, to grocery stores and gas stations.
“It’s going to hurt Burlington,” said Tom Satterly, superintendent of Burlington schools, which he estimated would lose $400,000 out of a $7 million budget. “The quality of education will change.”
“If I have to absorb the hit, we’ll have to lay off teachers and discontinue programs,” Satterly said. “This first year I don’t know what we are going to do.”
The parents of 50 of the district’s 800 children have jobs at the prison, he said.
Satterly’s brother, who works at the prison commissary, is leaving town, Satterly said.
Mark Weber — vice president of Burlington First National Bank, chief of the Burlington Volunteer Fire Department and treasurer of the school board — is in a good position to see a range of potential impacts the prison closing will have on Burlington and surrounding communities.
“You hate to see the prison close, because it affects everyone,” Weber said. “It’ll impact what we get off taxes, which runs our fire department. It’s going to have a huge impact in the Goodland (Kan.) area, where a lot of prison officers rent homes.”
The governor’s office said a cabinet-level team will visit Burlington soon and a budget request for impact mitigation will be completed for the September meeting of the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee.
“We learned many difficult lessons with the closure and repurposing of the Fort Lyon prison in 2012,” Hickenlooper said in a statement. “We are committed to assisting this community with the impact of this closure and identifying ways to replace the lost economic activity.”
Sen. Sonnenberg said he would continue talking with Burlington city leaders and Kit Carson County commissioners to ask what they need to help the town recover. If school enrollment remained the same, the state’s per-pupil finance formula means the state would make up for the lost tax dollars to the school district — but many expect school enrollment will drop. A bigger issue, Sonnenberg said, might be how the area deals with the loss of city and county tax dollars and with 140 residents out of work.
The senator said he would push for a three-year recovery plan by the state.
“We don’t have enough prisoners to keep those three private prisons open,” Sonnenberg said.
