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Vidmar called the internal DOC decision-making process badly flawed.
"If we are the best location then it ought to be located here . . . (And) when I looked it over at the beginning it was so obvious that Pueblo should be the preferred location," Vidmar said.
The DOC recommendation that the office stay in Colorado Springs hit the Pueblo community hard, Vidmar said.
"The buzz was these would be great jobs, well-paying jobs. There was such a buzz because we knew we put our best foot forward. We'd come together. I think it's just like the air being let out of the balloon (or) as people in this town say, 'We can't win for losing.' " Meanwhile, a just-released internal DOC report -- compiled as part of the selection process -- shows that 42 percent of the Department of Corrections headquarters staff already live in the Pueblo-Canon City area. El Paso County is home to 48 percent.
Of the 239 workers at the Colorado Springs headquarters office, 26 percent live in Pueblo County and 16 percent reside in Fremont County, according to the report, which the DOC compiled based on employee ZIP codes.
Any final decision on a headquarters site appears months away.
Approval of the project will not come until after the Legislature considers the decision, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections said. The project will run the regular course of Legislative action, including reviews by the Joint Budget Committee and Capital Development Committee, the spokesman said.
Questions about the project's status arose after photographs showed site preparation work under way at the new south Colorado Springs business park that DOC recommends as the site for the new office. The work appears related to the business park in general and not directly to the DOC project.
In Pueblo, the DOC's pick of Colorado Springs continues to upset local civic leaders, who maintain that Pueblo's formal bid topped Colorado Springs and Canon City on issues such as cost, site selection criteria and local support. Pueblo was the only bidder to offer local tax incentives ($1.5 million cash) to the state.
Further, local leaders argue that Pueblo is better positioned among Denver and the many prisons in Southern Colorado (of which three are located in Pueblo) and that an earlier personnel report showed Pueblo County is also home to the largest share of all DOC workers. Fremont County ranks No. 2.
The new report from the DOC on where its headquarters staff lives would seem to further bolster the argument by Pueblo that the Pueblo-Canon City corridor is the hub of not only the state's prisons but DOC employees.
Last week, state Rep. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, addressed that specific issue in a meeting with DOC Director Ari Zavaras in Pueblo, saying "Colorado Springs has almost no relationship to the Department of Corrections."
McFadyen, who early on encouraged Canon City to bid for the project while also supporting Pueblo's bid, said disconnect with the Colorado Springs office was hurting employee morale in the rest of the department.
In considering criteria, the DOC should also factor in "the cost of morale to employees. There was not a single department that had lower morale" in a recent state survey, McFadyen said.
The meeting with Zavaras and McFadyen also was attended by state Sen. Abel Tapia of Pueblo, several members of Zavaras' staff, representatives of the Pueblo bid team, members of The Pueblo Chieftain editorial board and two Chieftain reporters. The meeting was sought by Zavaras and the Pueblo group as a way to learn more about Zavaras' recommendation and the Pueblo group's concerns.
Zavaras told the Pueblo group he considered the Colorado Springs site the best pick to promote the "operational efficiencies" of the department, and that one of the deciding factors was a previously undisclosed internal study of the travel costs related to each site.
Zavaras later agreed to review any new information on travel costs provided by the Pueblo group, which has criticized the travel study and many aspects of the original bid process as flawed. Members of the Pueblo group say they plan to draft a report for Zavaras' review on a host of bid-related issues, including travel.
Vidmar said she expects City Council to press the issue and, told of the local group's plan to issue a report on its concerns, she offered her encouragement. "I don't believe after putting out a Request For Proposal that a department should then say we're going to manipulate numbers or add factors to the process," she said.
Vidmar said her comments stem from her observations of the process as City Council president, noting that, at the outset of the bid process, she disqualified herself from any involvement due to her family's real estate interests in one of the Pueblo's proposals. A different proposal -- one that would put the headquarters office near Kohl's shopping center -- is now considered the leading Pueblo bid.
In the earlier report on employee residences, requested of the DOC by The Chieftain, the results showed that nearly half of the state's 6,183 corrections workers make their homes in Pueblo and Fremont counties.
Pueblo ranked No. 1 with 1,361 workers and Fremont was No. 2 with 1,252 workers.
El Paso County ranked a distant third with 610 workers.
The earlier report did not provide a breakdown of the headquarters staff.
In the report on headquarters staff, the DOC found that of its 239 workers assigned to the central office, 63 reside in Pueblo County, 39 reside in Fremont County and 114 live in El Paso County. The remainder live in: 13, Denver Metro; three, Teller; two Otero; two, Lincoln; and one each in Chaffee, Montrose and Phillips counties.
To see more of The Pueblo Chieftain, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.chieftain.com. Copyright (c) 2008, The Pueblo Chieftain, Colo. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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