Published: February 22, 2007 11:17 pm      

A note from the editor

If you pay taxes in Hunt County, what you’ll read today, tomorrow and Sunday in the Herald-Banner should be an eye-opener. It certainly shocked us.

In November 2006, the Herald-Banner began investigating the shifting foundation at the Hunt County Criminal Justice Center, a building that cost taxpayers more than $14 million when it was built five years ago.

In the following months, we discovered the problems inside aren’t merely cosmetic. They’re serious enough to have caused major safety concerns for inmates and jail employees, enough to make some people nervous about working in the jail.

We took our cameras and notepads inside the jail, interviewing the people who work there and documenting the problems we saw. We gathered information from thousands of public documents, including e-mails sent between county contractors, and correspondence with the Texas Commission on Jail Standards. We talked with elected officials and created an eight-minute video for our Web site, HeraldBanner.com, to show taxpayers what it’s like inside the jail they paid for.

We also discovered the jail’s foundation problems are a continuing burden on taxpayers — to the tune of more than $500,000 since it was built.

This series wasn’t easy to research. Even after months of sifting through public records and conducting interviews, we’re left with more questions than answers — including why so many records about the jail’s construction are missing or inaccessible.

This series certainly won’t be the end of our coverage of the jail’s problems. We do, however, hope it’s a starting point for Hunt County taxpayers to understand the complex, expensive and politically charged problems at the jail.

Derek Price

Editor, The Herald-Banner