Local legislators Monday lauded bi-partisan cooperation in announcing Stateville Correctional Center will remain open, three months after the Department of Corrections tabbed the maximum security unit for closing.

“Clearly this was a bi-partisan effort on both sides of the aisle to rectify a decision that was short-sighted, and we all worked together to make sure it would not happen,” said State Sen. A.J. Wilhelmi, D-43rd District, of Joliet.

During a press conference at Prairie Bluff Golf Course, less than a mile from the maximum security prison in Crest Hill, Wilhelmi and several area legislators made the announcement, and called for a review of the Illinois Department of Corrections’ long-range planning.

“This is not over,” said state Sen. Christine Radogno, R-41st District, of Lemont. “We need to examine more closely the decision making and planning of the Department of Corrections, we need to be very critical about its planning process.”

Several legislators at the press conference called the state’s initial decision to close the facility as “short sighted,” saying more than $200 million in improvements have taken place at Stateville over the last decade, and closing the site would only cause over-crowding in an already over-burdened statewide system.

“A recent audit shows the prison capacity statewide is at 134 percent. This is no time to be closing prisons. We need a moratorium on prison closings,” Radogno said.

The issue of whether to close the maximum security unit of the prison — Stateville also is home for a processing center and minimum security unit that was not targeted for closing — came under scrutiny in February when the department said it planned to close the facility as 2008/2009 budget talks began.

“That’s not the appropriate time to bring up the closing of one of the state’s largest maximum security prisons, especially the one closest to Chicago and Cook County,” Wilhelmi said.

Wilhelmi said once the department made its plans known he immediately began lobbying Governor Rod Blagojevich’s office to reverse the decision to shutter the facility, located near Illinois Route 53 and Division Street.

In a release issued May 5, Senate President Emil Jones said Wilhelmi “came to me immediately after the announcement regarding Stateville in early February. He told me that stopping this closure was his top priority.”

The rationale to close the facility was flawed, Wilhelmi said, because “nearly 70 percent of the inmates are from Chicago and Cook County, and this is the closest facility to Chicago.”

The state’s initial plan called for maximum security inmates to be moved to the Thomson Correctional Center in Carroll County near the Iowa border.

“Also, the Joliet area does not need to have another prison shuttered,” Wilhelmi said. “The Collins Street facility was closed several years ago, and we don’t need that to happen twice to the same region.”

Closing the prison would have resulted in a loss of more than 400 jobs, and would have forced employees to either relocate or lose their jobs, said Larry Walsh, Will County executive.

“Closing Stateville was ill-conceived, ill-timed and poorly thought out,” Walsh said.

“Not only would hundreds of workers been dislocated, but the state would have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in recent renovations,” Walsh said.

To relocate the 1,600 inmates currently in custody at Stateville to other, more remote locations around the state, would have unfairly burdened families of inmates, Radogno said.

“Families from the Chicago area would have to travel much farther to visit loved ones if inmates were relocated to other sites,” Radogno said.

Wilhelmi said cost estimates to improve the facility range from $20 million to $100 million, and “could be provided if we can pass a capital bill in the future.”

State Rep. Brent Hassert, R-85th District, of Romeoville, said the decision would have no impact on the state’s decision to sell off property west of the prison to developers. Revenue generated from that sale is expected to fund road improvements at Weber Road and Interstate 55.

“That property already has been declared surplus, so this announcement will have no bearing on that,” Hassert said.