Bradley Plan to Put Prison in Saugus Hit

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley Thursday proposed locating a new state prison in Saugus, and was immediately assailed by local residents and politicians who accused him of playing gubernatorial politics at their expense.

Bradley’s proposal is the latest in a long-standing debate over where to locate a prison in Los Angeles County. The Legislature in 1982 passed a measure requiring California to put a state prison somewhere in the county. The county has none, but provides 38% of the state’s male prison population.

Republican Gov. George Deukmejian has supported a prison near downtown Los Angeles, and has criticized Bradley for not helping state officials build it.

Bradley, the expected Democratic candidate for governor next year, has repeatedly criticized Deukmejian for failing to build new prisons anywhere--what the mayor calls “one of the great failures of his (Deukmejian’s) Administration.”

City Owns Land

Bradley told a press conference at the proposed site in Saugus that he has asked the governor to consider backing a prison on a city-owned, 520-acre tract, assessed at about $8 million, and located a few miles from Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park.

The site, owned by the city since 1951, once served as a facility for men convicted of public drunkenness, and is best known as the “Old Saugus Drunk Farm.” It has more recently been a vocational training center and a sports camp for underprivileged children, but is now unused.

Surrounded from the beginning of his press conference by angry local residents who waved anti-prison and anti-Bradley signs, Bradley said the Saugus site would offer more space for a state prison “at the fraction of the cost” of the site supported by Deukmejian.

The site favored by Deukmejian, about 30 acres near 12th Street and Santa Fe Avenue in the downtown Los Angeles industrial area, has been estimated to cost $31.4 million.

“(The governor) hasn’t built a single new prison cell at a new site in the three years he has been in office,” said Bradley, repeating a charge he appears to be making one of the major themes in his yet-unannounced campaign.

But Deukmejian had his defenders. Assemblywoman Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley) and County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who also is the state Republican Party chairman, held their own press conferences at the site, following Bradley’s.

‘Certainly Political’

Antonovich said Bradley was promoting “a false economy move.” Prisoners need to be near courts and hospitals, and a Saugus site would increase transportation costs, he said.

Wright called Bradley’s proposal “certainly political. . . . The mayor does not lose a vote putting it (a prison) in a conservative area such as this.”

(In the 1982 gubernatorial campaign, Bradley lost Saugus by a ratio of 3 to 1 to Deukmejian.)

Bradley dismissed charges that he was playing politics with prisons. “I’m just asking that they consider it, have the necessary environmental hearings,” he said.

Deukmejian declined, through a spokesman, to comment, referring calls to Rodney Blonien, secretary of the state Youth and Correctional Agency.

Blonien said the state has already evaluated the Saugus site and rejected it as too close to residential communities and within a mile of four schools.

The state--not Bradley--has the ultimate authority to decide where a new prison should go. However, Bradley’s endorsement of the Saugus location is expected to make any action on the downtown site politically difficult.

Held in Assembly

A measure authorizing the downtown prison passed the Senate this year but was held up on the floor of the Assembly by Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco).

The bill is expected to be considered again when the Legislature returns in January. But after the mayor’s announcement, its approval by the Democrat-controlled Assembly would be viewed as a slap at Bradley, an unlikely move particularly during a gubernatorial campaign.

A resulting stalemate could have other serious consequences for Deukmejian’s ambitious plans to add space for 19,000 inmates by 1989. Under a law enacted to put pressure on Los Angeles County, the state is prohibited from occupying a new women’s prison proposed for Northern Califonia until a final decision is made on a Los Angeles prison site.

Democrats who represent the area near downtown, including nearby residential Boyle Heights, expressed satisfaction with Bradley’s proposal. Assemblywoman Gloria Molina (D-Los Angeles), who led the battle against the downtown prison site, called Bradley’s proposal “a fantastic victory for the East Los Angeles community.”

Saugus residents, many with only minutes’ notice that Bradley would announce the plan there, piled into family cars and sped to the proposed prison site as the mayor’s helicopter landed on a hill above Bouquet Canyon Road.

Residents said a prison would trigger a climate of fear in an area of middle-class, single-family homes that, ironically, has attracted thousands of young couples from other parts of Los Angeles County for its sense of safety and a relaxed, family life style.

Times staff writer Thomas Omestad contributed to this story.