THE mayor of a town housing a maximum-security jail says the Tamworth community has nothing to fear from a new correctional centre.
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Wellington mayor Rod Buhr said his town’s experience since a 600-inmate maximum security jail opened in 2007 had been mostly positive.
“I can’t see it having a negative impact on Tamworth, to be perfectly honest,” Cr Buhr, who is also a serving police officer, said.
Speculation has raged in recent months that Tamworth could be the site of a new jail to help house some of the state’s burgeoning prison population.
In August, Tamworth Regional Council resolved to write to the Baird government to gauge its interest in having a new jail powered by the council’s proposed $300 million renewable energy facility.
The Wellington Correctional Centre, located outside of Dubbo, was opened in 2007 despite staunch opposition from some in the community.
However, Cr Buhr said many of the claims made against jails had failed to eventuate.
“I totally disagree that a jail is going to bring about a reduction in property values – that would be absolute nonsense,” he said.
“There’s jails in towns like Bathurst and Lithgow and Goulburn and all those centres have quite buoyant property markets. It’s had no effect at all.”
Cr Buhr said the argument that so-called “undesirables” would flock to Tamworth, should a new jail be built, to be close to incarcerated loved ones, was also “something of a fallacy”, as prisoners were moved frequently.
He also said while Wellington had issues with drugs – “as there is in every other town in NSW, regrettably” – they were not linked to the jail.
“There will be some people who try to smuggle contraband into the jail, but that’s totally different to the drug issue in the town itself and the two are just completely unrelated,” he said.
But Cr Buhr did warn that many of the employment and economic benefits promised by the state government in the lead-up to the jail’s opening had not eventuated.
“Initially, one of the carrots dangled was that the jail was going to source a lot of the stuff they need locally,” he said.
“That was the case in the early days of the jail and council did all right out of it too, because we won the contract to take the waste from the jail. But council has lost that contract, because jails, like most other government departments at the moment, have been told to tighten their purse strings.”