NYC’s borough-based jail boondoggle is nearly $8B over budget and years behind schedule

The Big Apple’s borough-based jail program has nearly doubled in cost and remains years behind schedule ahead of the troubled Rikers Island complex’s legally-mandated shutdown.

The plan has ballooned into a $16 billion boondoggle and isn’t slated to wrap until at least 2032 — five years after the City Council’s deadline to end housing inmates on the Rikers jail complex.

The council set the Rikers closure date for 2027, under a law approved in 2019 that also began the process for building four borough-based jails each capped at about 4,100 beds.

The budget for the project, initiated under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, was about $8.7 billion at the time.

But years later, costs have snowballed and the first borough-based jail, in Brooklyn, isn’t expected to open until at least 2029.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration admitted earlier this summer that the city won’t meet the deadline to close the notorious lockup by August 2027, while insisting it remained a “top priority” — but staying mum on an updated timeline.

“It is not breaking news we are not on track to meet that timeline. We have a lot of steps along the way to get to the day when Rikers is finally closed for good,” Dana Kaplan, the Mamdani-appointed “Close Rikers Czar,” said in June.

City Council Criminal Justice Chair Selvena Brooks-Powers (D-Queens) previously said new legislation would need to be introduced in order to fix the gap between the current closure date and the first facility tentatively opening in 2029.

The city’s Department of Design and Construction, which oversees the project, said construction and early work has started at each of the four sites.

Workers in April finished building the skeleton of the Brooklyn location — a 15-story jail at 275 Atlantic Ave. in Boerum Hill.

Residents complained about rooftop concrete and sheet metal pouring onto their streets from the jail’s construction last summer.

Similarly, Chinatown leaders are pleading with the city to reconsider the location of Manhattan’s lockup, a 16-story “jailscraper” they claim could cause the ground to sink and potentially endanger other nearby buildings, according to a letter exclusively obtained by The Post. 

That jail is set to open in 2032, while the ones in The Bronx and Queens are scheduled to be finished the year prior. All three have started early work.

Meanwhile, the city permanently shuttered Rikers’ North Infantry Command facility in late June, transferring more than 200 inmates with medical needs to a new housing unit at Bellevue Hospital.

A City Hall representative pointed The Post to the mayor’s April comments on Rikers when asked Monday for an update to the anticipated timelime.

“It is going to take us quite a bit of time to ensure that we can put our city back on the path that the City Council voted for in 2019,” Mamdani said at the time. “And it will also take a whole-of-government approach.”