JEROME, ID (KMVT) While voters in Jerome County have narrowly refused three times to approve building a new jail, the need for a new jail there hasn't gone away.

The Jerome County Commissioners managed to get a fourth jail vote on this year's November ballot. But they pushed that back to May of next year for three different reasons.

Commissioner Charlie Howell says, "We had some property come forward, and we couldn't get those costs to figure in our budget, that matched the budget between $10 and 11,000,000. We couldn't get the design of the jail between the $10 and 11,000,000. And then the city's running a bond also, and that was a concern."

A consent decree from the end of March 1993 found that the Jerome County Jail wasn't suitable for housing inmates. Since then, improvements have been made in areas like staffing. But the physical building itself is what consistently fails to meet standards set by state laws.

Jail Administrator Lt. Rob Neiwert says, "That amount that we're paying $20 to 26,000 a month to house those inmates outside of the facility here would potentially double. Because if this jail closed down, we would have to house those inmates elsewhere."

Neiwert says the Jerome County Jail is housing only half of the 60 inmates it has in custody. The other half are being held out of county, which costs Jerome County more than 120 thousand dollars a year. Jerome County Sheriff says Doug McFall he would have to close the jail if a court order told him to, or if the jail lost its insurance.

McFall says, "I feel a moral obligation that when this becomes more of a liability and a danger to the inmates and my staff than the benefit of keeping the doors again, that we're not gonna be able to keep the doors open beyond that point."