Amador County will move forward in seeking state funding for a new county jail, the board of supervisors announced Tuesday.

Supervisor Richard Forster, at the end of the board meeting, said that during a closed session meeting, the board agreed to move forward to hire a consultant to prepare the grant application

The grant, from Assembly Bill 900, passed last year as the Public Safety and Offender Rehabilitation Services Act, could provide up to $30 million toward a new jail.

At present, the county jail has only 76 beds, but is expected to need 165 beds by 2010 and 217 beds by 2030, according to a report presented to the board last week by Harry Munyon of TRG Consulting in Rancho Mirage.

If the county wins the grant, it will need to find up to an additional $10 million to complete the project. The state grant would pay up to 75 percent of the costs.

Amador County is in a strong position to be awarded the grant because last year it agreed to join Calaveras and San Joaquin counties in providing a reentry facility at the old Northern California Women's Facility in Stockton.

Counties that participate in reentry facilities are to be given preference for the jail funding, and the consultant told the supervisors that its participation will gain Amador County an extra 300 points in the rating system for the grant. In the past, he said, the margin between getting or not getting a grant has sometimes been as slim as three points.

Reentry facilities are a way to have inmates serve the last year of their sentence in a secure facility where they can get drug or alcohol counseling, meet their parole officer and be exposed to programs that will prepare them for successful release.

Signed by the governor in May, AB 900 authorizes $750 million to finance local jail facilities and requires the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to develop reentry facilities throughout the state for 16,000 inmates. The bill provides that reentry facilities each house no more than 500 inmates and that they be sited only in cities or counties that request them.

AB 900 also encourages social and health care services, including job training, drug and alcohol counseling and mental health services be provided to inmates during their time in the reentry facility.

The grant proposal has to be submitted by March 18, and Munyon told the supervisors last week that the proposal should actually be completed two weeks earlier, in order to get an advance technical review by the Corrections Standards Authority.

After this week's board meeting, Forster said three sites for the new jail facility are now being considered: Wicklow Way at Highway 88, the Sierra Pacific Industries property near the county's new Health and Human Services building and a site on upper Jackson Gate Road.

Three previously discussed sites, the Preston fire training center in Ione, the old Safeway site in Jackson and county-owned property in Carbondale, have been ruled out, he said.

The new jail site, Forster said, must be at least 7 acres, in order to provide room for expansion.