Eastside Seethes Over Prison Plan : Anger Aimed at Polanco’s Vote and at the Legislative Process

Carlos Garcia Jr. stormed into his father’s bedroom and threw the morning newspaper at him.

“What is this garbage?” the 20-year-old Garcia asked, pointing to a story about newly elected Assemblyman Richard Polanco casting the key committee vote paving the way for construction of a new state prison in East Los Angeles. “You got us to vote for this guy.”

The elder Garcia, active in his neighborhood Chamber of Commerce, the Knights of Columbus and the Latin Business Assn., had lobbied his relatives and friends to vote for Polanco (D-Los Angeles) on June 3.

He was outraged by Polanco’s committee vote two days after the election.

“I voted for him because he said he was against the prison,” said Garcia, 40, recalling Polanco’s campaign promise to vote against it. “My credibility with my family now is zero.”

Outrage Shared by Many

Garcia’s outrage is shared by thousands of Eastside residents, not only at the prospect of a prison in their neighborhood, but at what they consider the underhanded manner in which the prison proposal is working its way through the legislative process.

In addition to Polanco’s key Assembly committee vote, they say the state Department of Corrections initially presented plans for a smaller project at a public hearing and minimized the extent of community opposition. Eastside leaders of the fight against the prison also say that someone in Sacramento deleted their objections and other questions about the prison-authorizing bill when the analysis of the bill went before the full Assembly for a vote.

Moreover, they said the site near 12th Street and Santa Fe Avenue in Assemblywoman Gloria Molina’s district was selected only after other sites had been rejected for many of the same objections that they have raised. And they say the project appears to be a political vendetta against Molina.

Opposition to the prison “is the biggest grass-roots, spontaneous movement I’ve seen in the Eastside in the 1980s,” said Antonio Rodriguez, director of the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice in Boyle Heights. “This movement came out of the guts of the community.”

After months of vocal but frustrating attempts to block the prison, more than 200 opponents were on their way to Sacramento today to lobby against the bill in the Senate and to demonstrate outside the Capitol.

They say corrections officials have ignored their objections that the proposed prison would increase the high concentration of inmates in the area--where within three miles of the proposed site there are already several jail facilities housing more than 12,000 inmates--and that the location is within two miles of 26 schools. The nearest residences are about a mile away.

Similar objections raised to locating the prison elsewhere in Los Angeles County, on the other hand, achieved their purpose by getting the proposals blocked, the Eastsiders say.

“They look at our community as not having any political power or effectiveness,” said Molina, a Democrat. “When they looked at other sites, they walked gently.”

Although the proposed prison would be located in Molina’s district, adjacent to Polanco’s, its opponents spill across Assembly district boundaries. Their ranks include housewives, church groups, businessmen, service clubs and educational and political organizations.

Hundreds of Eastside residents turned out at two public meetings with corrections officials earlier this year to protest the prison. Protest leaders note bitterly that those same officials later characterized opposition as “modest.”

For the past several weeks, prison opponents have rallied more than 1,000 demonstrators at a time to protest at weekly vigils on East Olympic Boulevard near the site.

Delegation Turned Away

Two weeks ago, opponents sent a delegation to an open house hosted by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) at his Los Angeles office to deliver a letter outlining their objections and inviting the Speaker to visit the site. The delegation was stopped at the door by a state police officer who told them, “This function is not open to uninvited guests.”

Corrections officials spent more than three years studying more than 100 potential prison sites before settling on the 8.13-acre Crown Coach International property in March, 1985, as the “ideal” location for Los Angeles County’s first state prison. The department had several times rejected the property at 2428 East 12th St. as too small.

State law requires that construction begin on a new state prison in Los Angeles County before any other new prisons can be occupied. The county has no state prison despite the fact that 38% of the state’s male convicts come from the area.

The downtown site, about two miles southeast of the Civic Center, first surfaced as a proposed prison location in September, 1984, seven months after the Department of Corrections had chosen a site near Lancaster in County Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s district.

Antonovich, then-chairman of the state Republican Party, vigorously opposed that desert site and retained a real estate firm that came up with the Crown Coach property as an alternative.

Corrections officials presented their plan at a poorly attended public hearing in November, 1984, as a proposed reception center where new inmates would be processed before being assigned permanently to prisons elsewhere.

By the time Crown Coach was selected, corrections officials had expanded the reception center proposal to include a 1,700-bed medium-security prison, urgently needed for a system already at 162% of capacity.

The officials said there was no attempt to deceive Eastside residents.

“We initially thought it was going to be a reception center,” Corrections Department spokesman Robert Gore said Tuesday. “After a year, we came to see the Crown Coach site as a full prison site.

“We’re still talking now about a facility that would be mostly reception or medical-psychiatric. We don’t feel we’ve ever misstated what the prison was supposed to be, and we’ve held meetings whenever we were requested to do so by the community.”

Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside) then introduced a bill appropriating $31.4 million to buy the Crown Coach site and some adjacent property.

The Senate unanimously adopted Presley’s bill in September, 1985, and it was sent to the Assembly where Molina was confident that she had the votes to kill it in the Public Safety Committee. What happened in that committee left many Eastsiders convinced that the prison is part of a Brown vendetta against Molina.

Brown backed Polanco to fill the 55th Assembly District seat vacated by Richard Alatorre, who became a Los Angeles city councilman. Molina, once Brown’s deputy in Los Angeles, supported Polanco’s opponent, Mike Hernandez, in what turned out to be a close and expensive election. Molina had also defeated Polanco in 1982 for the Democratic nomination for the seat she now holds.

Hours after Polanco was sworn in on June 5, Brown named him to the Public Safety Committee, removing Robert J. Campbell (D-Richmond), who Molina counted in her votes against the prison. Polanco joined the majority in voting to send the bill to the Assembly floor where it passed, although he voted against it there.

“I never thought Willie would go this far,” said Molina, who saw the Speaker’s powerful hand in steering the bill.

Polanco said he voted for the prison bill in committee to enable the full Assembly to decide the issue.

“I was absolutely not placed on the committee to vote for the prison,” he said. “The Speaker didn’t influence my vote at all. Had I known we didn’t have the floor votes to kill the bill, I would have voted differently in committee.”

The Center for Law and Justice’s Rodriguez called Polanco’s explanation “offensive,” saying it treats “our community like foolish children who don’t understand the process. When a legislator wants to stop the passage of a bill damaging to his community, he does it by any means necessary, including blocking it in committee.”

The bill, as presented in committee, contained an analysis spelling out community opposition and other objections.

Even though the Corrections Department “states that its own prison siting policy respects local opposition and despite (its) characterization of the local opposition to the Crown Coach site as ‘modest’ compared to other sites, the local opposition to Crown Coach appears nearly unanimous,” the analysis said.

It also noted that opponents consider the site vital to Boyle Heights redevelopment efforts and that they point out that it will cost more than $30 million to purchase and $115 million to develop, is within a mile of schools and is in an area already housing more than 12,000 county and federal prisoners.

The analysis also questioned purchasing the site before an environmental impact report is prepared, and asked how a valid environmental report could be done since the bill prohibits such a report from considering alternate sites.

In a departure from usual practice, those comments were deleted from the analysis when the bill went to the full Assembly.

Joan Gibson Reid, principal consultant in the Assembly’s bill analysis office, said changes in the analysis “eventually came to our office through Bill Hauck in the Speaker’s office.” Hauck could not be reached for comment.

Eastsiders opposed to the prison said one Senate aide referred to the project as a legislative “slam dunk” in the way it was hurried through the Legislature, but that was before hundreds of protesters took to the streets after Polanco’s committee vote.

Their strategy in Sacramento will be to keep the Senate from concurring in the Assembly version of the bill, forcing it to a joint house conference committee. They recognize that their attempt is an 11th-hour effort, but they say the issue has galvanized the community to ensure that they are never again caught unawares.

“The politicians stepped on a land mine when they voted this prison,” said Veronica Gutierrez, 24, a recent University of California, Berkeley, Law School graduate who has demonstrated against the prison. “The community is outraged enough to never let this happen again. What Polanco has done to this community is totally unforgivable. I’d much rather forgive a rapist.”