Nowata County looks to get jail for free

<br>(Nowata-AP) -- Reserving jail space for federal inmates could be the key to Nowata County building a four (M) million dollar lockup for free. <br><br>County commissioners gave the go-ahead yesterday

Tuesday, September 26th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

(Nowata-AP) -- Reserving jail space for federal inmates could be the key to Nowata County building a four (M) million dollar lockup for free.

County commissioners gave the go-ahead yesterday to study a proposal to use U-S Marshal Service funding to build a new jail in exchange for reserving space to hold illegal aliens.

The proposed jail in Nowata would be for at least one hundred beds and would be operated as a county lockup. Sheriff Jim Hallett says the Marshal Service would reserve about half of the beds for its prisoners.

As part of the proposal, the city's airport runway would need to be expanded by one-thousand-feet so the Marshal Service could transport prisoners.

Hallett says that the Marshal Service would reimburse the county 55-dollars for each inmate bed, even if the bed was unoccupied.