Henrico officials, who have sent some female inmates to Chesterfield County due to overcrowding, said they are awaiting estimates on how much it would cost to retrofit the space in the former Best Products corporate headquarters to house the inmates.

The proposal to use the Best Products building would also require approvals from the state Department of Corrections, Wade said.

The renovations to the building would include creating showers, a laundry area and open floor bunk space, said John Neal, Henrico’s director of general services.

The inmates who would reside at the newly constructed building would be offenders who are often out in the community while serving their sentences, such as offenders who are on work-release arrangements where they leave the jail temporarily to work at their jobs, Wade said. It would also house people who serve jail time only on the weekends as well as other inmates in Henrico’s Opiate Recovery By Intensive Tracking program, known as ORBIT, who work on crews that do landscaping around county buildings.

“We had 88 people that were ready to go to work crews [as part of ORBIT]. We don’t have space for them,” Wade said. “And that program is growing. This building is more about treatment.”