VACANT PRISON TURNS EXPECTED BOOM TO BUST

BONNE TERRE, Mo. -- A half-century past its prime as one of the nation's
top lead-mining towns, the rural community of Bonne Terre envisioned
newfound prosperity when it was chosen as home for the state's largest
and costliest prison.

Instead, the city is in debt, new businesses are near broke and euphoria
has turned to disappointment.

Six years after the grand announcement, the $168 million prison still
has no inmates -- and no scheduled opening date.

Lawsuits and construction delays combined to push back the completion
date from 1998 to the end of this August. But even then, the prison will
remain closed because the cash-strapped Missouri government cannot
afford the $12 million needed to equip it or the nearly $45 million
required annually to run it.

The boom that has turned to bust in Bonne Terre is the result of an
aggressive expansion, begun in the mid-1990s, that will nearly double
the capacity of the Missouri Department of Corrections.

With the economy booming, numerous states began building prisons, making
room for an influx of inmates caused partly by tougher sentencing laws
and a rise in drug-related felonies.

Communities that once might have shunned prisons were competing for them
with incentive packages like those used to lure big businesses.

States Are Struggling

Now states are starting to struggle.

In North Carolina, for example, a legislative subcommittee recently
recommended that the state Correction Department drop one of three
planned prisons because of a lack of money.

"That situation is relatively new since the downturn of the economy,"
said Tracy Huling, a criminal justice consultant from Freehold, N.Y.,
who generally works against prison expansions.

"It all of the sudden has occurred to state governments that they need
to be spending money elsewhere or saving money. So there is a sudden
pressure on state legislators to rethink their prison building plans,"
Huling said.

It's Costing Bonne Terre

Competing with several cities in the mid-1990s, Bonne Terre agreed to
purchase the land for a state prison and issued bonds to help pay for
$14 million in improvements -- a project nearly 10 times the size of its
annual budget.

"We put in sewer lines and water lines and built roads, and business
leaders in the community all geared up to either expand their businesses
or open up," said city manager Jeffrey Jeude, who previously was the
mayor and a city councilman.

"Now we're paying back the loans on these improvements and we don't have
any increase in revenues to do that," said Jeude, adding that the city
may be forced to raise its sewer rates.

Businesses are in a similar bind.

A new Texaco convenience store, featuring a dozen gas pumps, four car
wash bays and three fast-food outlets, opened in 1998 in front of a hill
of leftover lead mine chat and across the street from a former mining
building.

Owner Lance David assumed the prison would open soon.

"We didn't reach our goals, unfortunately," David said, because "the
delay in construction hurt us financially. But we did survive." David's
display sign now touts the "Largest Selection of Ice Cold Beer."

Businesses On Hold

"If it would have been built on time, it would have helped everybody in
the community, from us to the people building houses and apartment
buildings and the land developers," he added. "Right now, everybody is
just sitting still, they're afraid to do anything in town."

Businesses that didn't build early are now taking a wait-and-see
approach, which is putting would-be land developers on edge.

Howard Wood leads a firm that bought 240 acres near the prison, clearing
apple and peach trees to reveal reddish-brown dirt ready to support the
foundations of new homes or businesses.

So far, only a bank has committed to the site. And it hasn't begun
building.

"There's a certain skepticism ... and I think that has hurt our ability
to get it going," said Wood, president of development for Community
Services Corp. "We're just one of a multitude of businesses who were
dependent upon the prison going ahead and opening."

Local businesses have lost millions of dollars, perhaps even tens of
millions, Wood estimates.

Yet businesses didn't think they were taking a gamble when the prison
was announced in 1995. Nearby Potosi saw a minor economic revival after
getting a prison in late 1989. The county's unemployment rate dropped
nearly 25 percent from 1998 to 1990 while the state's rate remained
relatively static.

"The chronic unemployment that existed there following the closing of a
mine ... really didn't turn the corner until a prison opened," said Bill
Niblack, a manager of labor market information in the state Department
of Economic Development.

The St. Joseph Lead Co., which mined for 100 years at Bonne Terre and
near Potosi, stopped digging locally in 1961, moving farther west in
Missouri after discovering new, cheaper-to-mine lead deposits.

Mining Has Fled

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, however, the Bonne Terre area was
considered the lead mining capital of the United States. St. Joe Lead
constructed more than 300 miles of underground railroad tracks to bring
to the surface thousands of tons of lead each year.

Even the city's name reflected its fortune. Bonne Terre in French means
"good earth," a label applied to the clay that contained an ample amount
of lead ore.

St. Joe Lead, as locals called it, helped build Bonne Terre's hospital,
library, golf course, public water system and First Congregational
Church, and ran several farms and stores.

"Anything that Bonne Terre needed back at that time, St. Joe Lead
Company furnished," said Jack Lawson, 82, a retired mining materials
buyer who followed his father's and grandfather's footsteps in working
at St. Joe Lead.

Now many of Bonne Terre's 4,039 residents work elsewhere, commuting to
neighboring towns or 60 miles northeast to St. Louis, said Larry Hughes,
Bonne Terre's economic development director.

Like other towns without big industries, the largest employer in Bonne
Terre is the school district, followed by a nursing home. Yet put
together, their 550 employees don't match the work force of 819 guards,
medical professionals, maintenance workers and administrators that would
be hired at the Bonne Terre prison.

Population Boost

The prison's 2,684 inmates would boost Bonne Terre's population by
two-thirds, even if none of the new workers actually lived in the city.

Included at the prison is a combined kitchen and food warehouse twice as
long as a football field with black kettles the size of small hot-tubs.
The plan is for prisoners to help cook meals, which would be chilled
immediately for shipment to nearly 30,000 inmates daily at prisons
across eastern Missouri.

The "quick-chill" food plant is intended to save money by reducing the
kitchen expenses at other state prisons.

But to save money, the state must spend money to hire staff and operate
the prison.

Faced with a budget shortfall of $300 million, Missouri Gov. Bob Holden
ordered most agencies to make immediate cuts earlier this year and to
trim their spending requests for the fiscal year starting July 1 by an
additional $300 million.

The Department of Corrections left vacant hundreds of guard positions
and decided to delay the opening of new prisons in Bonne Terre and
Charleston. The smaller Charleston prison, with a $20 million operating
cost, now is expected to open by spring 2002, said Department of
Corrections spokesman Tim Kniest.

Without an unexpected influx of money, the soonest the Bonne Terre
prison could receive funding is July 2002. And then it would take
several months to hire staff and buy equipment before the prison could
open.

Business owners in Bonne Terre, meanwhile, have begun rethinking the
benefits of a local prison.

New Motel Suffering

In January 2000, Jayne Bess opened a 40-room Super 8 Motel just a little
down the road from the prison, counting on inmate visitors and prison
suppliers to help fill the rooms. After one year of business, Bess was
fortunate to fill even one-third of the motel.

Still, she hopes the prison will someday give her a boost.

"The longer we can hold out the better it's going to be. I know it may
be difficult," Bess said. "A lot of business people had high hopes ...
we're very disappointed, we're very let down."

Cary Combs, believing the prison would finally open this year, signed a
one-year contract to advertise his pay day loan company on a billboard
directly across the road from the prison exit. On a bright yellow
background, its red and green letters proclaim: "PayDay Today. Pay Day
Loans" with a phone number and directions to his business.

But there are no prison employees to be paid -- much less needing loans.
When construction work wraps up, the billboard's only audience may be
sightseers catching a glimpse of the vacant prison.

"At the time, I didn't dream there would be any problems with it
opening," Combs said.