County looking to continue jail inmate phone service contract

El Paso County commissioners are moving forward with an inmate phone service contract for the county jail annex expansion.

County commissioners discussed the options available Monday morning, and decided to continue working with the current phone service provider, Global Tel Link Corp.

An existing contract with GTL expires this September, and completion of the jail annex project isn’t expected until May of next year. That project is also already 309 days behind schedule.

The main options before commissioners were to modify or extend GTL’s contract, or go out to bid on a new provider, something that could have caused even further delays for the annex.

“During the presentation, the existing vendor offered us sort of a menu of options,” said County Judge Veronica Escobar. “There is one of those options that the court is interested in, and we gave direction to the county attorney’s office to negotiate with regard to that option… Then the only difference in terms of getting it done will be the amount of time it takes to ink the contract and bring it back to Commissioners Court. We’re pretty confident that everything will be seamless.”

A contract extension or modification is expected to be brought back for commissioners to approve in the next few weeks.