State corrections chief says he’d have to shut a prison to meet budget reduction target

CARSON CITY — A prison the size of the Lovelock Correctional Center, which houses more than 1,600 inmates, would have to be shuttered if 5 percent budget cuts are ordered by Gov. Brian Sandoval, Nevada’s prison chief said Wednesday.

James Dzurenda, director of the Department of Corrections, included closure of Lovelock in his budget plan to account for the potential 5 percent cut, as requested of all state agencies by the administration.

Dzurenda said he is not seriously proposing to close Lovelock, a medium-security penitentiary in the tiny town of the same name about 90 miles east of Reno along Interstate 80. He stressed such a move is unrealistic and would cause a ripple effect throughout the prison system and communities.

But he said the proposal exemplifies how difficult a 5 percent cut would be for the department to implement.

“I had to put it out there,” he said of the line item in the budget planning document. “That’s the only way we can do that.”

Sandoval’s office said prison closures are not on the table.

“The document submitted last week were department requests and recommendations, not the governor’s final budget,” Sandoval spokeswoman Mari St. Martin said in an email. “The governor is not considering closing down Lovelock or any state prisons.”

But Dzurenda said that the $521 million, two-year general fund budget for corrections that Nevada legislators approved in 2015 already is stretched to the breaking point. He noted that Nevada’s inmate population, which now stands at more than 13,000, is growing faster than previous projections and the budget didn’t include funding for ongoing costs, including hiring 100 new correctional officers and adding staffing for a wing at Florence McClure Women’s Correction Center in Las Vegas.

And there’s no room in the system to accommodate more prisoners if Lovelock, which numbers O.J. Simpson among its inmates, or another facility was closed.

“In order to close it down, we don’t have room anywhere else,” Dzurenda said. “So the only way to get our inmate count down by 1,600, they would have to be released. We can’t do that.”

The recent budget request for the fiscal year beginning in July 2017 submitted by the Department of Corrections was for $529.6 million. Keeping Lovelock open brings the total to nearly $557 million.

Budget requests from all state agencies, including the 5 percent cuts, totaled $8.2 billion, up $800 million from the current $7.4 billion general fund spending levels. Without the reductions, they total $8.5 billion.

Mike Willden, Sandoval’s chief of staff, told reporters last week the requests are just one step in the long budget-building process and emphasized reductions are not a certainty.

The independent Economic Forum in early December will forecast how much revenue the state will collect during the upcoming biennium. The state budget must align with the projections, or include a new revenue source to fund additional spending.

Sandoval will present his budget recommendations when he delivers his State of the State address to lawmakers early next year before the 2017 Legislature convenes Feb. 6.

Contact Sandra Chereb at schereb@reviewjournal.com or 775-461-3821. Follow @SandraChereb on Twitter.