A contentious Hardin jail narrowly prevailed Thursday in the first step toward placing inmates in the lockdown, which has sat empty since it opened late last year and has since defaulted on the bonds sold to build it.

However, members of the Department of Corrections committee that evaluated the jail as a site for a new correctional program cautioned that many questions still hang over the facility and their score is hardly a guarantee that the jail will end up with a state contract.

Hardin’s Two Rivers Detention Center put in for an 88-bed contract to run Montana’s unique Sanction, Treatment, Assessment and Revocation Transition program, or START. They competed against Butte-based, Community, Counseling and Correctional Services, Inc., or CCCS, which runs a host of correctional programs in Montana, including the 3-year-old START pilot project in Warm Springs.

A four-member panel evaluated proposals from both, giving each a numerical score. Those numbers will then go to Department of Corrections Director Mike Ferriter and other managers who are expected to make a final decision in mid-October, said Gary Willems, chief of the agency’s Contracts and Facilities Management Bureau.

The START program is for probationers who violate the terms of their release. It is intended to be a second chance, prison-like setting to give felons a taste of prison life, while offering them various therapies to help them succeed in society.

The panel generally gave CCCS higher marks and complained that the Two Rivers proposal was incomplete and confusing. Specifically, several members were uncertain about who was ultimately responsible for Two Rivers: the economic development arm of the City of Hardin which built the 450-bed jail as a way to bring jobs to the town or Community Education Centers (CEC), the New Jersey-based, for-profit company the town hired to run the facility.

Some of the criteria the panel looked at dealt with the financial stability of the would-be contractor. CEC clearly has a firm financial footing, members said, but Two Rivers itself is already in default.

“It’s scary territory,” said Kerry Pribnow, a panel member.

The decision came down to the cost each said they would charge the state to run the facility. CCCS reported that it would charge the state $117 per inmate, per day, although the committee later increased that amount because they disagreed with the way CCCS explained that cost in their proposal.

Two Rivers came in at $75 a day, although their proposal contained little of the required information explaining that figure.

The panel gave Two Rivers a score of 1,837; CCCS earned 1,743.

Mike Thatcher, president of CCCS, said the panel was wrong to give Two Rivers maximum points for their bid costs when they offered no justification for it.

“I could have put $42 in there,” Thatcher told the panel. He said he was appealing the entire process.

Several panel members expressed similar concerns. The group decided to award Two Rivers the maximum points, but make note that Two Rivers gave no explanation for their figure.

Willems said the numeric score is only the first step in the process of awarding a state contract.

The 450-bed Two Rivers detention center has sat empty since it was built at the end of last year. Owned by the economic development arm of the City of Hardin, a city that has no police force, the jail has faced controversy for months.

City and economic leaders say they were led to believe by the past Corrections director that if they built the jail, the state would occupy it, although no contracts were ever in place and no written agreements have ever been produced.

The state has no use of the space, agency officials say.

In an effort to open the facility, the jail looked to other states for inmates, but first had to prove to a Helena judge that it could legally accept out-of-state inmates.

Although the judge ruled in its favor earlier this year, the facility has yet to attract any inmates.