Dave Baumeister | County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS – At the County Commission meeting this week, Erin Srstka of Minnehaha County Pretrial Services told commissioners about a project that has been in the works since 2015 to limit the number of incarcerated people here.
Srstka explained the pretrial, public assessment that can determine if people accused of crimes need to be incarcerated prior to trail.
Pretrial Services works with people from the time of their arrest until a sentence is rendered. Their current project is part of a MacArthur Safety grant of $350,000.
That grant money is being used towards new programs to reduce the numbers in jail, while still keeping the public safe, Srstka said.
To help show what the assessment program was doing, she presented figures from January to February of 2019 and 2020.
During that time, a drop of re-arrests and failures to appear were clearly seen.
For the first quarter of 2019, re-arrests were at 472 and failures to appear came in at 232.
This year during the same period, when “public safety assessments” were used, numbers had dropped to 255 and 147, respectively.
The idea behind such an assessment, or PSA, is to mainly look at the risk of violence in the community and the chances of a person not appearing in court.
Those who score low enough on the assessment are eligible for the program.
Srstka and others also talked about the latest aspect to the program, which was recently added.
If people in the program have a Smartphone, they can take advantage of facial recognition software to make all required “check-ins,” and to receive text alerts about upcoming court dates.
Srstka said that this allows people to stay at their jobs and not have to travel across town to make a check-in appointment.
Commissioner Cindy Heiberger, who has been involved with this program since its beginning, said they were looking at different ways to alleviate the numbers of people incarcerated.
She added that this became more important in the past two years since the remodeling began on the county jail.
All commissioners seemed to approve of this program, since it is essentially designed to keep people with their families and working, as well as reducing jail expenses for taxpayers.
The next steps outlined in Srstka’s presentation are to allow for expanding the program to “ramp-up” monitoring.
‘The Bridges of Minnehaha County’
At the meeting, Highway Superintendent DJ Buthe received the go-ahead for 14 bridge improvement projects.
The bridge work would be part of the Federal Bridge Replacement Program.
If any or all of the bridges are approved for federal dollars, there would need to be roughly an 80/20% federal match with county funds.
Again, depending on federal approval, the projects would have to be completed by 2023.
The bridges proposed for work are in the following locations: 3.7 miles east of Colton, 2.2 miles south and 1.3 miles west of Ellis, 2 miles north and 4.4 miles east of Colton, 1.6 miles west of Renner, 1 mile north and 0.3 miles east of Renner, 1.2 miles east and 0.2 miles north of Dell Rapids, 1.5 miles east and 0.2 miles north of Dell Rapids, 3.7 miles east and 6 miles south of Baltic, 4.2 miles east of Baltic, 6.8 miles east and 1.3 miles south of Dell Rapids, 3.7 miles west of Garretson, 2.9 miles north and 1 miles east of Corson, 2.1 miles north of Valley Springs, and also at the northeast corner of Valley Springs.
The next county commission meeting will be on Tuesday, June 23, at 9 a.m. in the Minnehaha County Administration Building at 6th and Minnesota in Sioux Falls.
All meetings are open and public comment is encouraged.