Trump Administration seeks to rescind $500 million for Eastern Kentucky prison
Federal authorities have asked Congress to cancel $500 million designated to build another large prison in Eastern Kentucky.
The U.S. Department of Justice included a request to rescind the funding in its budget request for the upcoming federal fiscal year, which starts in October.
The proposed Letcher County prison has been a source of controversy, lauded by supporters as an economic boon for a county hit hard by job losses in the coal industry but decried by opponents as an unnecessary boondoggle.
This is not the first time officials have tried to scotch money for the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) project.
The administration of President Donald J. Trump tried to cancel it in his first term, and the administration of President Joe Biden did the same. Now Trump’s administration is trying again.
However, U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers, a Republican who represents Eastern and Southern Kentucky and has been a key supporter of the project, has been able to beat back several prior efforts to cancel the funding.
Rogers said he’s ready to defend the project again.
“The people of Letcher County have invested nearly 20 years of planning and preparation for a new federal prison to bring more than 300 much-needed jobs to our region,” Rogers said in a statement to the Herald-Leader. “As a senior appropriator, I have helped secure more than half a billion dollars in federal funding that remain available exclusively for this facility, which will help address BOP’s need for modernized facilities.
“The proposed prison has surpassed multiple environmental studies and every ounce of red tape that has been doled out. Years of investments have been made in good faith to support this project at the federal, state and local levels, and I will continue working to see it to completion.”
There are four federal prisons in the eastern end of the state, in McCreary, Martin, Clay and Boyd counties.
The Bureau of Prisons, which is part of the Justice Department, approved building the prison last October after years of study.
The agency chose a site at Roxana, about 10 miles from Whitesburg, that was surface mined decades ago, leaving a flat spot atop a steep hill.
Developing the site would require extensive excavation and compacting, driving the estimated cost of the project to more than $500 million.
The prison would house more than 1,100 prisoners in the main medium-security section and about 250 others in an adjacent minimum-security camp, according to an environmental assessment by the BOP.
The prison is projected to employ 300 to 350 people, though in the early years many of those employees would transfer in from other facilities.
Those jobs are a key reason many residents support the project.
In addition to rescinding $500 million from the Letcher County project, the budget request from the Department of Justice includes rescinding $50 million from a prison project in Kansas and $60 million for a law enforcement training center.
Opponents have raised a number of complaints about the proposed Letcher County prison, including that it would perpetuate high rates of incarceration; that it could hinder efforts to attract other kinds of jobs to the county; and that it would damage the environment.
“This prison would be very harmful if built. It would harm my family, our history, our use of the land and our way of life,” Wayne Whitaker, a resident of Letcher County, said Friday in a release from an organization called Building Community, Not Prisons. “It would also harm the future of Letcher County as a tourist, educational, and recreational destination.”
Opponents of the prison bought a parcel of land at the site to try to block the project.
