Topeka ? Part of a new but unused juvenile detention center would be opened to ease overcrowded conditions for young offenders in state custody under a proposal endorsed Thursday by legislative budget committees.

The state spent $34 million building the 210-bed, maximum-security center for juveniles in Topeka, but Gov. Kathleen Sebelius did not include money to open and operate it in her budget proposal for the fiscal year that starts in July.

This week, however, Sebelius proposed spending $1.4 million to open two sections of the new center to house 60 maximum-security juvenile offenders.

Both the Senate Ways and Means Committee and the House Appropriations Committee agreed Thursday to include the money in budget cleanup bills they are drafting for consideration when legislators reconvene next week after a long recess.

The 60 offenders would be moved from an adjacent juvenile corrections complex in Topeka that is supposed to hold 219 offenders but had 246 as of Thursday.

“Basically, we have no choice,” said Sen. Jim Barone, D-Frontenac. “The overcrowded conditions have reached the point where it’s trouble waiting to happen.”

Sebelius spokeswoman Nicole Corcoran said the governor decided to propose the additional spending after doing more research on trends in the population of juvenile offenders.

Not all of Kansas’ juvenile detention centers are overcrowded.

Mary Beth Kidd, a spokeswoman for the Juvenile Justice Authority, said centers in Beloit and Atchison were below capacity. But the Beloit center is only for female offenders, and the Atchison center for holds only the youngest male offenders, so they don’t mix with more hardened offenders.

At the Topeka center, however, medium- and maximum-security offenders have mixed, Kidd said, and overcrowding there “has been a very real problem.”

On the Net:

Kansas Legislature: http://www.kslegislature.org.

Juvenile Justice Authority: http://jja.state.ks.us/