When renovations were completed in mid-December allowing the Douglas County Jail to house more prisoners, the timing couldn’t have been better, officials said.

Sunday morning there were 182 prisoners in the jail, the highest number recorded since the jail opened in 1999, jail officials said. In fact, the past few weekends have seen large numbers of prisoners spending nights in jail, said Ken Massey, Douglas County undersheriff in charge of jail operations.

“There’s no doubt that if we hadn’t made these changes we’d probably have had 10 to 15 inmates farmed out every day to accommodate the (jail) population,” Massey said.

Sending prisoners to be held in other county jails gets expensive, Massey said. If the county were to farm out 20 prisoners to other jails that would cost about $900 extra per day, he said.

Last year a little more than $300,000 was used to renovate the jail’s work-release pod to also house minimum security prisoners. The pod originally had 56 beds for work-release inmates, but rarely were all of them used. The renovation allowed about half those beds to be used by prisoners determined to be minimum security risks.

The work called for removing upper and lower bunk-style beds and putting all beds in place at floor level. The arrangement of the new bed layout caused the elimination of a few beds, bringing the total to 51, Massey said. Monday morning there were 15 work-release prisoners and 30 other minimum security prisoners in the pod, jail officials said.

The jail has capacity for 196 inmates. In the past, however, many of those inmates were in the medium security section where there were 56 beds. Additional prisoners had to be farmed out even though the jail wasn’t quite at maximum capacity. Now more prisoners who meet the requirements can be classified as minimum security and moved to the renovated area, jail officials have said.

Prisoners in minimum security and work-release sleep on two levels and on the open floor instead of in cells. Part of the renovation was building a new enclosed outdoor recreation area.

Douglas County Commissioners Bob Johnson and Charles Jones toured the renovated jail unit for the first time Monday. Both said they were impressed.

“It would appear that the renovations are serving us well,” Johnson said. “A jail should not be an option for anybody, but if you’re going to have to be in jail then this is a pretty good place to be.”

County commissioners toured the minimum security and work-release area of the Douglas County Jail. Monday in the recreation area of the jail, from left, are Douglas County Sheriff Ken McGovern, County Commissioner Bob Johnson, Assistant County Administrator Pam Madl, County Commissioner Charles Jones, Douglas County Sheriffs Lt. David Dillon and County Administrator Craig Weinaug.

Jones said he was impressed with the jail, how it has adapted to new needs and how well the facility has held out.

No other immediate changes or renovations are planned at the jail, Massey said. In the near future, however, consultants from the National Institute of Corrections will study the jail’s inmate population growth and assess programs that would better allow released inmates to reintegrate with the public.

“It will be a very comprehensive study,” Massey said.

Johnson and Jones also toured a warehouse-style storage facility at the Douglas County 4-H Fairgrounds now being used to store old county office and court records. The facility, built and opened last summer, is climate controlled and all boxes of records will eventually be labeled with bar codes and tracked by computer. They also visited a new maintenance storage building built nearby. The total cost of the two buildings was about $600,000.