Broad Impact Report for Jail Site Likely in Anticipation of Suits

Frederick W. Olson says he would like the key document that would determine if a new county jail will be built near Anaheim Stadium to be short and sweet. But he knows it probably won’t be.

“Everyone always says, ‘We want to write an (environmental impact report) that’s tight and pithy,’ ” Olson said. “But then you look out and see the lawyers standing there.”

Olson is the environmental analysis manager of Orange County’s Environmental Management Agency. He will oversee the process of producing the environmental impact report on the 1,500-bed, maximum-security facility the county Board of Supervisors plans to build at Katella Avenue and Douglass Road.

Selection of the site has produced a barrage of protests from residents, business people, the California Angels, the Los Angeles Rams, Anaheim Mayor Don Roth and the rest of the City Council, as well as Supervisor Ralph Clark, who represents the district and was the lone vote against the location.

Court Challenge Threatened

Even before the supervisors’ vote on Tuesday, opponents of the Katella-Douglass site vowed to sue, and county officials believe that the most likely course of legal action will be to challenge the environmental impact report.

Such a possibility makes it necessary for an impact report to be very inclusive, Olson said.

“When you know you’re going to be attacked, you have a tendency to cover the world,” he said.

Because a highly paid counsel would leave no stone unturned in an effort to find legal fault with an impact report, then “sometimes we stretch” and insert material “no one has considered--or cares about,” Olson said.

The Board of Supervisors, in designating the 7.6-acre, county-owned site as the preferred jail location, also directed that the environmental study consider another site in Anaheim and two more in Santa Ana.

Olson said the study of the alternate sites “won’t be cursory,” but that most of the study is expected to deal with the preferred location.

The starting point for the impact report is a county-drafted environmental analysis checklist, a two-page document with print small enough to blind someone with 20-20 vision.

The checklist begins with the basics, listing impact on earth, air and water.

It then looks for effects on biological, cultural, scientific and natural resources. Next it considers aesthetics, energy, land use and transportation.

To prepare these reports, the county hires consultants. The consultants hire subconsultants.

City and county agencies are notified of the project and asked to call attention to any obvious problems. Engineers muddy their boots walking the ground. If bones are found, as happened in Mission Viejo, an archeologist will pore over the site, sifting fragments to see if a long-forgotten burial ground has been disturbed. If endangered species of birds are in the area--as with the least tern in Bolsa Chica--biologists are hired and scour the site, binoculars at the ready.

Olson said a dozen or so people may be involved in preparing an environmental impact report, including acoustical analysts, traffic engineers and planners studying land-use implications.

Preparation of the report can take months or years. The report on the planned Foothill Transportation Corridor, which will link the Santa Ana Freeway south of San Clemente with the Riverside Freeway near the Riverside County-Orange County border, is expected to take at least 2 1/2 years to complete and will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in consultant fees.

The report on the jail site will be ready in November at the earliest. The consultant is a partnership of LSA Inc. of Newport Beach and KennedyJenks Engineers Inc. of Irvine, which was being paid $300,000 for work on the report of a remote site of a larger county jail facility. How much the partnership will be paid to expand its work to include the new jail site has not been determined, Olson said.

The resulting report can be thousands of pages wrapped in binders six inches thick, sometimes in two or three volumes.

State law dictates how the report is prepared, what it must cover and how long it must circulate for comment. A draft version is distributed to local libraries and city halls, Olson said.

“Anyone who wants to then can comment on the document, can review it and comment in writing,” he said. Although the law says “substantive” comments must be answered, “in practice we respond to everything” except opinions such as “I don’t like it,” Olson said.

After the draft and final reports are approved, the Planning Commission considers them. Then the Board of Supervisors gets back into the act, approving or rejecting the proposed project.