Gates Pushes for Speedup on Building of New Jail

Now that overcrowding problems at the Orange County Jail are temporarily under control, Sheriff Brad Gates has begun a not-so-quiet campaign to get county officials to speed up plans to build another jail.

In the process, he is getting unexpected lobbying help from Lawrence G. Grossman, who has been appointed by a federal judge to oversee Orange County’s jail problems.

Gates angered some members of the county Board of Supervisors recently with a letter in which he stated, all in capital letters: “The county has already fallen behind in the planning process for facilities which will be needed by 1990.”

None of the supervisors disagreed. County officials believe that they are now at least two years behind the original 1990 goal for completion of an additional jail.

Political Posturing Suspected

However, some board members privately viewed Gates’ letter as political posturing to persuade U.S. Dist. Judge William P. Gray that it is the board--not Gates--that has dragged its heels in solving the county’s jail problems.

Thomas F. Riley, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, said he was “disappointed at the tone of the sheriff’s letter.” But in his written response, Riley said only that the supervisors were doing “everything within the parameters of the laws to expedite this process.” Riley said his low-key language was deliberate, because he wants to encourage a united front by Gates and the board.

The issue came to a head on March 18, when Judge Gray found the supervisors and Gates in criminal contempt, claiming they had failed to comply with his 7-year-old order to resolve overcrowding at the Orange County men’s jail in downtown Santa Ana.

Gray fined the county $50,000 and ordered that the money go toward paying the salary of a “special master” to monitor jail conditions and report back to the court. He also ordered the county to pay a fine of $10 a day for each inmate who had to sleep on the floor after his first night.

When Gray made that order, about 500 of the 2,000 inmates at the main jail were sleeping on the floor because no bunks were available. Last week, the jail had gone 11 days without having anyone sleep on the floor, Special Master Grossman said. The current population at the jail is in the 1,400s, the lowest it has been since the 1970s.

However, both Gates and the board are concerned that overcrowding problems will return unless a new correctional facility--which has been in the planning stages for four years--is built.

They say the county’s population growth eventually will generate more inmates than its jails can handle, despite the expansion of two branch jail sites at the James A. Musick Honor Farm near El Toro and the Theo Lacy facility in Orange.

By the year 2000, close to 7,000 jail beds will be needed to accommodate the county’s projected populaton of 2.6 million, according to Omni Group Inc., a consulting firm hired to help the county assess its jail needs. Gates projects that, based on Omni’s figures, he will need an additional 2,681 beds by 1990 and 4,292 more by 2000.

Short of Target

At last count, the men’s and women’s jails in Santa Ana and the two branch jails held 2,807 inmates. Even with the completion of three jail expansion projects in the next two years, the sheriff’s office will gain no more than 1,000 new beds--well short of the target goals.

“We need that new jail right now, before 1990,” Gates said.

Grossman strongly agrees. And the court-appointed official gave Gates a valuable--if unintended--political boost when he wrote in an Aug. 28 report to Gray that “. . . new facilities will surely be needed if Orange County is to continue to progress.”

“I don’t know details about how long it’s going to take to build a new jail, or to complete the expansion projects,” he added. “I just know that it needs to be done, and it needs to be done now.”

Gates predicts that, under the county’s current timetable, it will be 1992 or 1993 before a new jail is built and ready to house prisoners.

“We just can’t wait that long,” he said. “If we do, we’re going to be right back before the court the way we were this year.”

Site Not Selected

However, some supervisors privately complain that Gates is taking an unfair swipe at them because he knows--as they do--that no community in Orange County wants a new jail nearby.

To date, the county has not hired architects for the project, nor has it made any plans to finance construction. The county appears to be two years away from even selecting a site.

A site selection committee appointed by the supervisors, for example, has identified 25 potential jail sites in eight areas: Black Star Canyon, Prima Desecha, Trabuco Creek, Irvine Lake, Santiago Canyon, Rancho Lomas, Gypsum/Coal Canyon and the Pico area near San Clemente.

The supervisors are scheduled to hire a consultant in October to prepare environmental impact studies for the new jail. However, the studies are not expected to be ready for another 16 months. During that time, three public hearings will be held on the issue, and the board hopes to narrow the site choices down to eight or nine, according to Paul Carey, Riley’s representative on the county’s jail site task force.

“It (the report) will take 16 months if everything falls into place,” Carey said. “But it could easily take much longer. I think it’s safe to say we’re looking at the 1990s before a new jail is built.”

Gates has urged the board to speed up the timetable, but Carey said that does not appear likely.

Resistance Continues

Meanwhile, grass-roots resistance to the project continues.

Riley said he spoke to local officials at a League of Cities meeting last Thursday night and asked if any of them would like to volunteer a site for the new county jail in their jurisdiction.

“They just laughed,” Riley said. “This is politically a very difficult question to answer. Nobody wants a jail in their backyard, and people get particularly excited when they hear the words ‘maximum security.’ ”

Judge Gray, however, has given the county strict deadlines for reducing the overcrowding problem. He has ordered that the main jail have a ceiling of 1,500 inmates by Dec. 1 and only 1,400 by April 1, 1986. County attorneys have told the court they can live with that order because of expansion projects in the works.

The plans include:

- A new 600-bed modular-unit complex at the James A. Musick facility, which is expected to be completed by Dec. 1. The complex, however, will have only 280 new beds. Gates said the facility already has 320 beds in tents, which are supposed to come down when the new construction is finished. Even if Gates is allowed to keep one or two of the tents operating, a proposal his staff is considering, it still would represent a net gain of only 400 beds.

- A new intake/release center at the main jail, scheduled for completion in March, 1987, that will provide 385 new beds. The center will house people arrested for drunkenness and other minor offenses who are not expected to remain in jail very long and keep them separated from the main jail population.

- A new 180-bed work-furlough center at the Theo Lacy facility. The project is expected to be finished by March, 1986.