‘A little perplexed’: Questions raised over city’s $4 billion contract for construction of Queens jail
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The city was criticized for its proposed $4 billion contract to build Queens’ borough-based jail, which likely won’t be completed until four years after the city’s legally-mandated deadline to close Rikers Island. Eagle file photo by Jacob Kaye
By Jacob Kaye
Advocates and a lawmaker on Thursday spoke out against the city’s proposed $4 billion contract for the building of Queens’ borough-based jail, which may be completed four years after the city’s legally-mandated deadline to close Rikers Island.
The opposition came as the proposed contract between the city and construction company Leon D. Dematteis Construction Corp. headed into its near final phase on Thursday, following a public hearing held by the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services.
But advocates and lawmakers say the contract, which will cost taxpayers nearly $4 billion dollars and which will run through 2031, doesn’t make much sense.
Not only has the cost of the jail ballooned when compared to its original estimate, the timeline for the jail’s construction is far longer than what was originally proposed.
“I’m a little perplexed,” City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Criminal Justice, said during the Thursday hearing.
“Without more scrutiny on why the extended period is taking so long in the proposed construction timeline, I think we are putting ourselves in a very precarious situation,” she added.
The city quietly unveiled the proposed contract at the start of May, alongside a similar contract for the construction of the borough-based jail in the Bronx. The Queens and Bronx jails are designed to be two of four total jails built by the city to replace Rikers Island as the city’s main jail complex. The borough-based jails, which were crafted under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, were designed to serve as a more humane alternative to Rikers Island, which has seen over two dozen people die since Mayor Eric Adams first took office a little more than two years ago.
But while the city is legally mandated to close Rikers Island by August 2027, none of the borough-based jails will be close to completion by that time.
“This contract is incredibly important to the closure of Rikers and because of that, this project needs to be moved with all possible urgency,” Sarita Daftary, the co-director of Freedom Agenda, said during the hearing. “The completion timeline…is unacceptable when Rikers Island is legally required to close by Aug. 31, 2027.”
“I urge the administration to address these questions and ensure that this contract is actually moving in the fastest possible way,” she added.
Much about the construction and design of the borough-based jails has changed since Adams, who has never voiced full-throated support for the Rikers closure plan, took office.
Originally, the four borough-based jails in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens were supposed to together hold 3,300 detainees at maximum capacity.
However, the Adams administration upped the jails’ combined maximum capacity to 4,400 beds in recent months.
The Queens jail, which will be built behind Borough Hall and the Queens Criminal Courthouse was originally planned to be built with 886 beds. It now is expected to hold 1,150 beds.
And while the number of beds in each facility has increased, so have the construction timelines – just not proportionately.
The city originally said that the 886-bed Queens jail proposal would have taken a little more than four years to complete, or around 1.6 days per bed – even at that pace, the jail wouldn’t have been completed in time for Rikers’ closure.
However, under the new 1,150-bed proposal, construction is expected to take over seven years to complete, for a pace of around 2.3 days per bed.
Part of the reason the overall timeline increased was because the design phase of the jail increased – the city claims it will take three years for the design to be completed, despite the design of the Brooklyn borough-based jail, which is currently underway, taking around a third of the time to be completed.
City Hall did not respond to the Eagle’s request for comment on why the timeline has been increased disproportionately to the number of new beds. The mayor’s office also did not respond to questions regarding the specific reasons behind the construction delays or questions about the detailed breakdown of the cost of the project.
Adams has said multiple times in recent years that he believes the plan to shutter Rikers and replace it with the borough-based jails is unfeasible.
He’s mainly blamed the size of the city’s detainee population, which has increased nearly every month he’s been in office.
When Adams took office in January 2022, Rikers’ population was around 5,200 detainees. It was the fourth consecutive month the population had declined following a period of increases each month dating back to the start of the pandemic.
However, the jail’s population was around 6,300 people as of April 2024, the most recent month for which data is available.
Despite his insistence that the city can’t meet the requirements, including a lower jail population, of the current plan to close Rikers, advocates and lawmakers in the City Council have accused the mayor of taking few concrete actions to lower the population and work toward the jail’s closure.
“There is a realistic plan for reducing the jail population to meet the target of fewer than 3,300 individuals incarcerated in city jails, and a critical component is prioritizing decarceration of people with mental health concerns and expanding supportive housing and community mental health supports,” Jennifer Parish, the director of Criminal Justice Advocacy at Urban Justice Center Mental Health Project, said in a statement earlier this month when the Queens jail contract was first announced.
“Mayor Adams is failing in his responsibility to advance the plan to close Rikers,” she added. “Since taking office, he has proposed defunding [alternative to incarceration] and preventative programs – effective interventions for reducing incarceration, expanded the capacity of the borough-based jails by reducing space dedicated for specialized mental health units, and agreed to contracts that will result in people being incarcerated at Rikers Island long after the closure deadline.”
In an effort to potentially craft a new plan to map out Rikers closure, Adams and the City Council together reformed the Independent Rikers Commission, which was first created to craft the original plan to shutter the dangerous jail around half a decade ago.
But on Thursday, the commission’s leader was one of the voices speaking out against the proposed contract.
“Every day, every month the decrepit, isolated jails on Rikers are open, they undermine safety, justice and racial equity,” said Zachary Katznelson, the executive director of the Independent Rikers Commission.
Katznelson raised a number of questions about the proposed construction timeline and the jail’s cost, and urged the city to bring in a team of experts to examine both the proposed timeline and “see where we can reasonably save time and money.”
“There is a fierce urgency to close Rikers and get these jails built as quickly as possible,” Katznelson said.
