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Utah Corrections chief Rollin Cook had a captive audience Tuesday and it wasn't state inmates.
Gov. Gary Herbert and top advisers spent four hours touring the Utah State Prison, giving Cook a chance to show his boss the cramped buildings in disrepair and explain why he believes it is time to build a new lockup on a different site.
"It was our opportunity to really show him in detail our operations," Cook said. "How spread out things are. How disorganized."
Cook is a non-voting member of the Prison Relocation Commission, which is charged with picking a new prison site by Oct. 1.
Opposition groups in the cities under consideration have vigorously fought to keep the prison on its current site in Draper and have succeeded in getting the commission and Herbert to take a second look. But Cook said it would be "a real nightmare" to rebuild in Draper and he took the governor on a tour of the full prison and the surrounding acreage to explain his position.
"Could it be done? I guess it could," Cook said. "It would just cost more and take longer to do."
A new prison built in Salt Lake City, Eagle Mountain, Fairfield or Grantsville would take three years and cost roughly $550 million, according to state estimates.
Jon Cox, Herbert's spokesman, said the governor understood the "safety and security problems of operating the prison and a construction site at the same time" and left the lengthy tour with a refined understanding of why the prison needs to be rebuilt.
"This is a problem we just can't continue to ignore," Cox said.
Herbert has previously said that the state will build a new prison on the best site and that if that's Draper, so be it. That is a decision to be made in a special legislative session, likely to take place late this year.