EDINBURG - Down a stretch of highway far from the nearest city is the Hidalgo County Jail.

Everyone who is arrested in the county is ultimately incarcerated there.

Transporting prisoners there each day can take at least one police officer somewhere off the street for hours.

It's expensive, it's time consuming and by October 2009 it will be a thing of the past.

The Hidalgo County Sheriff's Office expects to unveil two new substations, one in the county's east side near Weslaco and the other in the west side near Alton.

There, instead of at the main office off U.S. Highway 281 on El Cibolo Road, in the northern reaches of the county, city police officers can drop off their prisoners.

"It makes everybody happy," says Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño. "This is something we had in mind when we first came into office."

Spending less money on gas and keeping more officers on the streets is especially important to smaller police forces that can't necessarily afford to be one man down.

In fact, transporting prisoners even from a nearby location can take up to two hours, Hidalgo Police Chief Vernon Rosser said.

And much of the time-consuming paperwork that city police officers have to fill out before they can leave a prisoner at the jail will be reduced, Treviño said. Officers will be able to fill out paperwork before showing up to drop off the prisoner, avoiding wait times of more than an hour that are often exasperated by several city agencies transporting prisoners to one jail, the sheriff said.

Blueprints for the new substations are set to soon be finalized.

By September, Treviño expects the bidding process for construction companies to start, and by October county leaders should award the contract. Construction on the new substations, at a cost county commissioners say cannot exceed $3 million per station, is expected to take up to a year.

The west-side substation is planned near Alton at Los Ebanos Road and Mile 7 North, where the county already owns nearly 12 acres of land. For the east side spot, the county is looking at land near the intersection of Mile 11 north and Farm-to-Market Road 1015 near Weslaco, Treviño said.

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Sean Gaffney covers law enforcement and general assignments for The Monitor. He can be reached at (956) 683-4434.