There is plenty of fodder for thought in the news that a privately built teen detention center in the Allegheny-Clarion Valley Industrial Park is nearing completion and could begin housing young people as early as July.

Some of them are:

The center's developers opted for a one-story, horizontal structure in a non-congested, rural environment - a facility easy to manage and that can be expanded with two additional groupings of 12 bedrooms each.

Currently, the detention facility has the capacity to house as many as 72 young people. It's interesting that private developers intent on making money would opt for such construction, while the Butler County commissioners, in charge of taxpayers' money, ignored county-owned land near Sunnyview Home, horizontal construction, and ease of future expansion, opting instead to buy land for the county's new prison, build it in a congested area with limited expansion possibilities, and build a multi-story facility that those with prison expertise say will be more difficult to operate. The county commissioners fired the consultant who recommended horizontal construction.

Would Commissioners James Kennedy and Glenn Anderson, who voted to build downtown rather than at the Sunnyview area site, been willing to shoulder the higher construction costs if they had been spending their own personal funds for the prison venture?

While developers of the detention center, which carries the name Western Pennsylvania Child Care, didn't spend months or years second-guessing their decision to build the facility in the industrial park, county officials have been sputtering along for years regarding the prison issue. The prison project has been a monument to indecision, reluctance, increased costs, and caving in to public pressure about the now-rejected Sunnyview site. Kennedy and Anderson made no genuine attempt to make that site work for everyone's benefit, nor to alleviate the fears of people residing in that area, other than caving in to their opposition.

People in the Sunnyview area now must acknowledge that they, like other property owners throughout the county, will pay higher taxes because of the higher costs associated with building the prison downtown. It has been only about 10 months since construction on the detention center began and the facility is nearing completion. In those same 10 months, the prison project has increased in cost by $10 million.

The new detention center will make money for the developers, while the prison will be a losing proposition for county government and its taxpayers. The prison project - groundbreaking still is months away, at the earliest - already having ballooned in cost by $10 million, to approximately $39.5 million, without a shovelful of dirt having yet been turned, has recorded a loss of at least $1.2 million by way of poor borrowing and investment decisions by the county commissioners.

The detention center was set up with quality programming for youths who must be housed there. Years after the board of commissioners stepped up efforts on behalf of a new prison, no one in county government has yet talked authoritatively about what assets the prison will include in terms of trying to rehabilitate those who must be incarcerated.

At the detention center, there are classrooms where the young people will be required to spend at least six hours a day learning. There are counseling rooms, doctors' offices and administrative and security areas, as well as a courtroom developers say will meet the needs of the county court system. There is a full-size indoor basketball court and an outdoor recreation area.

Meanwhile, prisoners in the downtown facility, while they shouldn't be coddled, will have fewer opportunities for exercise and other necessary physical activity than they would have had at a Sunnyview-area prison with abundant land.

The detention center will be operated by Mid-Atlantic Youth Services of Harrisburg. It is estimated that the facility will result in the creation of 100 jobs. The money to pay for those employees will come from the fee charged to counties for housing youths at the center.

Regarding the new prison, it's safe to conclude that additional employees will be necessary because of the prison's larger size in relation to the current lockup, as well as the manning challenges that a multi-story facility will entail. But when the new prison is ready for occupancy, will the county reduce the number of Sheriff's Department deputies, since Butler County prisoners will not have to be transported to other counties, as is the case now with the smaller, overcrowded facility?

The one concern county taxpayers might have regarding the detention center is that there are no tentative, "handshake" agreements in place under which Butler County government would eventually be required to assume ownership or operational expenses or responsibility for the facility. A similar facility in Luzerne County, which is owned by Western Pennsylvania Child Care and operated by Mid-Atlantic Youth Services, is under fire and the target of lawsuits. The controversy stems from a 20-year, $58 million lease agreement between Luzerne County and the facility.

This county's current muddy financial picture in regard to the prison project dictates that the county not accept any unknowns that could be disastrous to county property owners' tax bills.

What Butler County will pay to house youths at the facility and, indeed, whether county youths will be sent there, because of the new facility's expensive charges, remains to be seen. But the detention center and prison projects nevertheless paint a contrasting picture of private-sector efficiency versus public-sector bumbling.

Private investors made a decision and made it happen. Butler County governmental leaders acceded to emotions, instead of common sense, and have nothing yet to show for their efforts; and the project, via the investment errors, is losing money every day.

The county should be pursuing a horizontal prison with state-of-the-art security and a pleasing landscape on the county-owned land near Sunnyview Home, instead of the downtown prison that will clutter the courthouse area and do nothing to enhance the attractiveness of the city.

Time will judge how bad of a boondoggle the current prison plan will be from both a physical and financial standpoint.