Fulton County Sheriff Patrick Labat is urging the county to expedite a plan commissioners approved two years ago to modernize the elevators at the Rice Street jail, saying two recent elevator failures seriously jeopardized safety in the troubled facility.
One of last week’s incidents involved an inmate who was “actively bleeding out” from a stab wound while a responding medical team had to carry equipment up several flights of stairs to reach him because two elevators weren’t working, the sheriff told commissioners last week.
In a second instance, an officer was trapped in a stuck elevator alone with several inmates, out of reach of backup officers had he needed them, according to the sheriff.
Both Labat and Commissioner Dana Barrett said they are frustrated the elevator modernization project still has not been completed inside the jail, the conditions of which the U.S. Department of Justice has found to be unconstitutional, in part because of deteriorating physical facilities that contribute to violence.
“They absolutely need to be held accountable for a project taking two years that was never funded properly,” Labat told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday, referring to four commissioners with whom he often disagrees.
“We have gone though a budget cycle and a half to which they could have set aside the funds to complete the elevator modernization, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Labat has clashed repeatedly with several members of the Commission, over issues such as jail funding, staffing and whether to build a new jail or refurbish the existing facility.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Fulton spokesperson Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez said the county has spent millions of dollars to address facility needs and improve conditions in the jail while long-term capital projects are in the planning stages.
In August 2024, the Fulton Commission unanimously voted to allocate $1.65 million in emergency funding for the elevator modernization plan. But the project still has not been completed. Commissioners on Sept. 2 are expected to consider a contract for the project, more than two years later, at a cost expected to be around $4 million.
Corbitt-Dominguez said the county started working with an elevator consultant in January 2025 to assess elevator needs in the jail, leading to a formal procurement process. The county’s initial cost estimate of $1.65 million was based on the cost of a similar project in the Fulton County Government Center completed in 2021, Corbitt-Dominguez said.
“It’s definitely not an overnight thing to just replace a whole elevator,” Corbitt-Dominguez said. “With facility needs, some things just take longer to go through the process.”
Barrett, the outgoing District 3 commissioner, said the contract could be as much as $4.4 million — nearly three times the initial estimate.
“At the end of the day, there’s no excuse,” Barrett told the AJC. “It’s two years, and it was supposed to be emergency funding.”
Credit: Ben Hendren
Credit: Ben Hendren
Last week, Labat sent county commissioners two letters sounding the alarm about the jail’s elevators and asking them to hurry the modernization project along. Both letters mention a delayed medical response to the Aug. 18 stabbing that severed an inmate’s femoral artery, causing “catastrophic blood loss.”
At least two elevators were not working and another “would travel unpredictably to floors other than the floor requested,” causing additional delays during an emergency in which every minute mattered, Labat wrote in the letter dated Aug. 19.
“By the time the medical team reached the inmate, CPR was required to sustain his life,” Labat added. “Because of the severity of his blood loss, Grady EMS subsequently had to administer blood as part of the continuing lifesaving measures.”
The inmate survived.
“We cannot, however, view that outcome as evidence that the existing conditions are acceptable,” Labat wrote.
In his second letter, dated Friday, Labat informed commissioners that an elevator became stuck between floors the previous night, for five to seven minutes, with one officer and four inmates inside.
“The danger presented by this incident cannot be overstated,” Labat wrote.
“Taken together, these incidents demonstrate that the deteriorating elevator system is not merely an inconvenience or a maintenance concern,” he added. “It is an immediate and continuing life-safety threat to our employees, the individuals entrusted to our custody, medical personnel, and others who enter the Fulton County Jail.”
The seven-story jail has nine elevators, including four “housing elevators” used to transport inmates; two kitchen elevators; a medical elevator; and two other elevators for attorneys. Of the four housing elevators, only one was functioning as of Wednesday afternoon, and it was experiencing problems, a Sheriff’s Office spokesperson said.
Since January 2024, there have been more than 90 instances of elevators being taken out of service, sometimes for extended periods, the sheriff wrote to commissioners. The failures have involved circuit boards, cabling, controllers, panels, relays, door mechanisms and other critical components.
“Individual elevators have remained unavailable for extended periods,” Labat wrote, adding that the longest outage was for 178 days.
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