Town Tries to Secede From Senator in Prison Quest

No one would deny that there is something different about the tiny high-desert town of Adelanto.

While many civic leaders statewide are busy trying to keep prisons out of their towns, officials in Adelanto, 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles in San Bernardino County, have begged the state to send them convicts.

But their unusual 9-year battle has brought them not a single prisoner. So townsfolk have decided to take a new tack: They are officially asking to be removed from the district of conservative Sen. H. L. Richardson (R-Glendora), who is actively opposing the prison.

The request was forwarded to Gov. George Deukmejian in a most unconventional manner.

‘Flag of Surrender’

“The City of Adelanto recognizes its impotency to operate within the shadow of (Richardson’s) omnipotence, waves the flag of surrender and asks for mercy from the colleagues of Sen. Richardson--please set us free,” declares a resolution adopted last month by an angry City Council.

Richardson was not available for comment. But his chief aide, Michael Carrington, noted that the governor has no authority to redraw legislative district lines and charged that the city’s request for new representation is nothing more than “an antic.”

Richardson remains the state’s “leading law-and-order legislator who believes in locking them up,” Carrington said, but there are simply too many problems in placing a prison near Adelanto. Among those is the fact that the prison site is beneath the flight pattern of George Air Force Base and subject to severe airplane noise problems.

Adelanto City Manager Patricia Chamberlaine said the council’s unusual request “is a terrible long shot.”

But she said in an interview that “there’s nothing milquetoasty about the people of Adelanto or the officials of Adelanto. We learned long ago that niceness gets you absolutely nowhere. We’re very frank out here.”

The city’s strongly worded resolution is merely the latest development in an increasingly nasty war of words between officials of the town of 6,700 and Richardson, who became their senator in 1982 when a controversial reapportionment changed the boundaries of his district.

In recent months, prison opponents have begun a recall drive that targets four of the five council members. And Richardson has launched his own investigation of city officials amid suggestions by his staff that council members--several of whom are employed as real estate agents or developers--stand to gain personally from construction of a new prison.

City officials staunchly deny Richardson’s charge, accusing him of “waging a war of innuendo” by leaking rumors.

“What he is really doing is trying to discredit us,” said Mayor Edward A. Dunagan, who said a prison would be a “good, clean industry” for a town where the only major source of jobs is two cement factories.

At the heart of the dispute is the town’s desire to grow despite its less-than-robust economy. City officials say nearly one of every two residents is without a job, there are no physicians in town, no supermarkets and few of the services offered by most city governments.

The idea of attracting a 1,500-bed maximum-security prison with a $13.5-million payroll and the business it would bring made sense to city officials. At first the state, too, seemed overjoyed at the prospect of a town that wants a prison.

The state quickly bought a piece of property for $2 million. But everything changed after corrections officials were told that to build a prison beneath the air base’s flight pattern might open the state to potentially costly lawsuits. The city argued unsuccessfully that there already is a public school beneath the flight pattern and no suits have been filed.

Legislature Sold Land

Nonetheless the Legislature voted to sell the land. City officials claim this never would have happened if Richardson, who they said originally favored the project, had resisted pressure from opponents.

“Sen. Richardson claims he had a change of heart and realized that Adelanto wasn’t a good area for a prison,” Dunagan said. “We think that was a lot of bunk.”

Carrington, Richardson’s aide, said the senator was never convinced about the wisdom of an Adelanto prison. Moreover, Carrington said he and other staff aides began to wonder why officials continued to push the project even though it seemed to be a dead issue.