WASECA — A new resident scheduled to arrive in Waseca Tuesday has brought national attention to the town, prompting more than a few citizens to mess with the city’s slogan.

The phrase “For an hour . . . for a lifetime” has been tweaked to add, in one variation or another, “. . . maybe 24 years of confinement.” The new twists are making light of the federal prison sentence Jeff Skilling, former Enron chief executive officer, has been ordered to serve at the Federal Correctional Institution, Waseca.

Skilling was one of the masterminds behind a complicated scam that manipulated the energy company’s financial statements, which eventually led to Enron’s collapse in 2002. It was a conspiracy that cost thousands of employees their jobs and, in many cases, money they’d invested with the Houston-based company for retirement.

Those people are eager to see justice served, Waseca Mayor Roy Srp said while explaining the interest Texas media are suddenly showing in the city of about 9,500 people.

“There’s a lot of people in Texas looking forward to the door closing behind Skilling and seeing him pay his debt to society,” Srp said. “He is the highest profile inmate we’ve had, as far as I know.

“I like the idea of Waseca being on the map.”

Federal Bureau of Prisons officials won’t confirm that Waseca will be Skilling’s new home, but a federal judge has ordered Skilling to report to the low security prison by 2 p.m. Tuesday. Officials at the Waseca facility are denying any media access to the prison until 2007.

The fenced facility in the southwest corner of Waseca hasn’t drawn much attention since it was converted from a college campus into a federal correctional institution in the middle 1990s.

Srp was a rookie on the Waseca City Council when the University of Minnesota announced it was closing its Waseca campus in 1990, he said. Citizens had mixed feelings when it was announced that the prison was going to fill the empty space a few years later.

Fears the correctional institution would ruin the town have faded, said Jim Tippy, the prison’s first warden. He retired in 1998, about three years after transferring to Waseca from upstate New York to open the new facility. The people in town were so friendly, Tippy said, that he and his wife have decided to spend the rest of their lives in Waseca.

“I tell friends around the country what keeps you warm in Minnesota in the winter time is the people,” Tippy said. “It may be cold outside, but the people are warm and friendly.”

Before becoming a warden, Tippy also worked as a an inmate designator for the Bureau of Prisons during the early 1980s. It was his job to assign people to a prison after they were sentenced.

Tippy would consider an inmate’s length of sentence, the severity of the offense, whether there were pending charges and if there was a history of violence or escape behaviors when picking a prison, he said.

The Waseca prison is one step above a minimum security institution, which, in most cases, don’t have fences, he added. Security is tight for getting on and off the grounds, but the buildings inside don’t have barred doors and windows.

“It’s a former college campus,” Tippy said. “A lot of the existing buildings that were there when the Bureau of Prisons took over the facility are still there. We took them and modified them to our needs.”

What were dorms are now used for housing inmates, it’s just more crowded than it used to be, Tippy said. Rooms that were once home to two students now hold up to four inmates each. Inmates are also required to work, if able, at a factory inside the facility or by doing various prison support jobs.

Felicia Ponce, a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson in Washington D.C., said there are about 1,070 inmates at the Waseca prison. Most of the offenders are there for drug related offenses, she said.

Long before finding out Skilling was going to be assigned to the Waseca prison, Srp was paying attention to the Enron scandal. It’s one of few examples where a high-ranking and extremely wealthy white collar criminal has gotten a sentence he deserved, Srp said.

“I have put myself in the position of what it must be like to be out there free like he was and what he must be thinking now,” he said. “That would make you feel pretty sick, I would bet.”