Public enterprise

Prisoners from Sierra County, New Mexico (pop. 13,270) will no longer be held at the neighboring McKinley County jail in Gallup, after the Gallup facility lost a contract under which Sierra County had been paying $30,000 to $40,000 a month to house its prisoners. The prisoners will now be sent to a jail in Cibola County, instead.

Loss of the Sierra County prisoners will leave a hole in the jail budget. Since it has about 100 vacant beds, Warden Donna Goodrich says she’s now “soliciting prisoners from jails on the Navajo reservation and neighboring counties.”