The price tag on Alabama’s new prison under construction in Elmore County has risen again, this time to $1.082 billion.

The Alabama Corrections Institution Finance Authority (ACIFA), a panel that includes Gov. Kay Ivey, the state finance director, lawmakers and others, approved the new “final guaranteed maximum price” on the prison Tuesday.

The 4,000-bed men’s prison, which includes facilities for medical and mental health care, is scheduled for completion in May 2026.

The last time ACIFA met, in March, it approved a price cap of $975 million on the prison, which was up from the $623 million that was in a contract the state signed in April 2022, a 56% increase.

State officials attributed the increase at that time to inflation, design changes, and factors affecting construction in general.

In October 2021, the Legislature approved a plan to build two 4,000-bed prisons for men, the specialized care prison in Elmore County and one in Escambia County, allocating a total of $1.3 billion for both prisons.

Sen. Greg Albritton, R-Atmore, and Rep. Rex Reynolds, R-Huntsville, who are chairs of the General Fund committees in the Senate and House and are members of ACIFA, both said at Tuesdays meeting that the plan is still to proceed with the second prison.

Alabama has not built a prison since the mid-1990s. Ivey and legislative leaders have said the new prisons are a key step in the overall effort to improve the prison system, which faces a lawsuit from the Department of Justice alleging that it holds men in conditions that violate the constitution because of the violence, weapons, drugs, and other problems.

“The new prison facilities being built in Alabama are critically important to public safety, to our criminal justice system and to Alabama as a whole,” Ivey said in a statement after the meeting. “As inflation impacts every aspect of the American economy, ongoing construction projects by the state are no exception.  We have not built new prisons in more than 30 years, and if it was easy, it would have been attempted by a governor before me. No doubt this is a major undertaking, but we are pressing on.”

This story will be updated.