Work is underway to remove mold from the state’s only women’s prison, and the planning to replace the prison continues.
That’s what the Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee heard during a meeting Thursday with Jennifer Fitch, commissioner of the state’s Department of Building and General Services.
The Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington currently houses 95 women. The prison has faced a slew of misconduct claims in recent years, as well as complaints about unsanitary conditions, particularly in the bathroom and shower areas.
“The way that it works with correctional facilities is that [Buildings and General Services] is in charge of maintenance of the building,” Fitch told the panel Thursday. The Department of Corrections “is in charge of custodial and cleaning of the facilities, and so we have a partnership in terms of how we maintain and operate the buildings between ourselves and DOC.”
Fitch said the buildings department steam cleans the prison’s sewer lines twice a year. Corrections staff members contact her department and submit a work order when mold is believed to be in the facility, she said.
The buildings department then hires a consultant to conduct mold testing to determine the extent of a problem, she said.
Concerns were recently raised over mold in one of the prison’s units, called Alpha, and the consultant found that there was no mold there, Fitch said. Instead, workers discovered that grout had turned a greenish color due to the use of showering and cleaning products over time.
“We basically pressure-wash them, and then operations and maintenance will go in,” Fitch said of the work to address the issue. “They will remove any broken tile, they’ll put in new tile, and they will regrout the bathroom.”
In another unit, Delta, mold has been detected, though she said “it is not airborne.” Workers have been called in and will remove any materials with mold in them, Fitch added.
“They will replace them, they will clean the area and then again we will go in and will replace tile and regrout the showers,” the commissioner said.
Mold in the prison has been a longstanding issue, and was the subject of a court trial last October, when a woman incarcerated at the prison testified that stalls smelled of sewage, and maggots and sewer flies were crawling around.
According to evidence presented to the court, the conditions had worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the regular steam-cleaning of lines coming to a stop.
Judge Samual Hoar denied a request to issue a court injunction to remedy the situation, though he didn’t dispute the conditions that had been described.
In his ruling, the judge wrote that, while the stalls were “far from a luxury spa,” the evidence did not rise to an “actual threat to health and safety.”
“Like an outdoor privy,” he wrote, “the shower room may not be a place where one would choose to linger, but it appears to serve its most basic function.”
The judge added that the corrections department had worked to remediate the problem.
Fitch told the committee Thursday that, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and in an effort to reduce transmission of the virus, the buildings department’s access to correctional facilities had to be limited.
“And so unfortunately what that meant is that it was challenging to get in there and do some of these preventative maintenance activities like steam-cleaning the lines,” Fitch said.
Through meetings with James Baker, interim corrections commissioner, Fitch said they were able to work out the matter and make sure buildings department staff could get into the women’s prison to steam-clean the lines.
Earlier this year, lawmakers were told it would take at least six years to build a new facility to replace the current outdated women’s prison, and cost up to $60 million.
At the meeting Thursday, several committee members wanted to know how the planning for a new prison was progressing.
“We are moving into what’s called the programming and planning phase,” Fitch said.
A recent consultant’s report outlined several options for replacing the prison, ranging from one large prison to several regional facilities.
“In the end, we all kind of coalesced around a hybrid, in between — some larger facilities, some smaller — as well as reentry facilities for men and women,” Fitch said. “We were allocated funding in the capital bill over the next two years to do planning and programming.”
The commissioner likened the process to assembling the pieces of a giant puzzle.
“This next step is really going to be to look at how those building blocks fit together,” she said, “and then make recommendations on where these facilities should be sited, specifically the women’s correctional facility, and the new women’s reentry facility.”
Committee members said Thursday they were anxious for progress.
“We’re hoping for action sooner rather than later,” Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden and a member of the legislative oversight committee, said at the meeting.
This year, $500,000 has been appropriated for the planning and programming work, said Rep. Alice Emmons, D-Springfield, chair of the oversight panel and of the House Committee on Corrections and Institutions.
Sen. Ginny Lyons, D-Chittenden, an oversight committee member, spoke of the need for speed.
“I just would like to add some enthusiasm for alacrity and moving forward as quickly as possible,” Lyons said. “I’ve been in the Senate a number of years and I think many of those years have been spent discussing the needs — not just the site planning, but also the program needs for the women’s prison. And I feel that we are way behind in the work.”
She said that wasn’t intended as a shot at either the corrections or buildings departments.
“I think it’s a criticism of ourselves for not taking a faster step forward,” Lyons said.
