The Pima County Board of Supervisors will decide today whether to lease an unused portion of its juvenile detention center to Catholic Community Services, which will use the facility to house migrant families.
The vote comes just weeks before the former Benedictine Monastery in midtown Tucson, where thousands of asylum seekers have been housed since January, will be converted into residential and retail space.
The initial lease to Catholic Community Services β which will continue to oversee the aid efforts β is $100 a year.
The estimated cost to the county, however, for the next five months is estimated to be $530,000.
The plan has drawn fire from critics opposed to spending public dollars on assisting migrant families and others who object to the optics of migrant families staying inside the former detention facility.
City and county officials and those with Catholic Community Services repeatedly have stated that theyβve looked for an alternate site to temporarily house migrant families for the past six months.
The families, fleeing violence and poverty in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Brazil and other countries, are here legally and are processed and released by the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A last-minute attempt to find an empty school in Tucson by Pima County Supervisor Richard Elias and Tucson Unified School District board member Adelita Grijalva also failed to identify a viable alternative before the monastery closes in early August.
County officials have been working around the clock to make the unused portions of its juvenile detention center to be more welcoming to families, removing locks on doors, covering surveillance cameras and painting colorful murals.
The county is also planning on applying for federal grant funding β including tapping money from its Operation Stonegarden grant β to offset any direct expense to the county.
The vote will be held at the Pima County Administration Building, located at 130 W. Congress St. The meeting starts at 9 a.m.
