A new 165-bed jail may be in the future for Amador County if the board of supervisors decides to apply for a state grant.

Up to $30 million is potentially available to the county from Assembly Bill 900, passed into law last year as the Public Safety and Offender Rehabilitation Services Act.

Amador County's jail, which has only 76 beds, was built in 1984 and is now considered woefully inadequate.

"The need is obvious," Harry Munyon of TRG Consulting in Rancho Mirage told the supervisors at their meeting Tuesday. "This jail is very overcrowded. When you are sleeping people in holding cells, you have a serious concern." By 2010, Munyon said, the county jail will need 89 more beds.

Richard Forster, chairman of the board of supervisors who represents District 2, expressed concern about where the county will find the additional $10 million that would be needed to complete the project. The state grant would pay up to 75 percent of the costs.

"Some say this opportunity will never come up again," he told Munyon.

"It's not likely that we'll see an opportunity like this for another decade," Munyon responded. "But it will happen again."

Time is short, Munyon told the supervisors, and the first requisite is a needs assessment. The county also must decide whether it wants to build a large new jail and do away with the present one, or build a smaller new one and keep the old jail to reach the total number of needed beds.

Sheriff Martin Ryan told the supervisors that while a new jail is an expensive proposition, "the alternative is facing lawsuits and injuries to staff that are not going to get any better." Between 1999 and 2006, he said, the number of inmates increased by 112 percent, while staffing went up by only 28 percent.

"We do need to be able to include the proper amount of staff, not only for the safety and security of the inmates, but also for the safety and security of the staff," Ryan said.

Amador County would be competing with the 30 other small counties in the state for the grant money, Munyon said, and at the moment, it looks like fewer than a dozen of those counties will be applying for the grants. But, he said, "people will try to opt in at the last minute, which is not a good idea, and others will drop out."

One factor in the county's favor is that it agreed last year to partner with Calaveras and San Joaquin counties in developing a reentry facility at the old Northern California Women's Facility in Stockton.

The reentry facility is not to be a "half-way house," but a secure facility where inmates would serve the last year of their sentences and could receive drug or alcohol counseling, meet their parole officers and be exposed to programs that will prepare them for release.

When the board of supervisors considered joining in the reentry program last year, former Mule Creek State Prison Warden Richard Subia told them that inmates are currently released with $200 in their pocket, minus the cost of a bus ticket.

Munyon told the supervisors that counties that are working on reentry facilities gain an extra 300 points in the rating system. In the past, he said, the margin between getting or not getting a grant has sometimes been as slim as three points.

Ryan told the supervisors that the proposed reentry facility the county is participating in will be the first such reentry facility that is up and running. "I think we have an opportunity to be right at the top of the list to acquire the money," he said.

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

Supervisors indicated they did not know where the 25 percent matching funds would come from, but Munyon replied that, "You are in the same position that most counties are. Nothing has been done for a long time. To catch up with your need is a big jump, and it just keeps getting more expensive as you go on."

Jon Hopkins, General Services Administration director, told the supervisors last year that each bed in a new jail facility costs $112,500, and that if the county could find a way to reduce that cost, it could petition the state to reduce the amount of matching funds needed.