Supervisors Vote to Build Power Plant Near Saugus

County plans for a $27-million electrical generating plant near Saugus won supervisors’ approval Tuesday, despite a complaint that the plant is being built because of a 2-year-old county mistake.

Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, who dissented in the 4-1 vote, called the county’s action “merely the latest episode in a sad and costly chapter in county government.”

Hahn alleged that the plant is being built in part to provide some use for an $8-million, natural-gas turbine that supervisors purchased in late 1984, when they were expecting to install two such turbines in a new downtown power plant.

Electrical power produced at the plant was to be sold to the City of Los Angeles for $75 million a year. But a contract with the city was never signed, county officials acknowledged.

“Kenny feels it was very foolhardy . . . to commit to buying these very expensive” turbines, Hahn aide Dan Wolf said Tuesday. “The mistake was made two years ago, and there’s been a scramble to put the best face on it.”

County officials conceded that the collapse of an agreement with the city left the county with more turbines than it needed two years ago. But Jack Michael, energy conservation coordinator for the county’s chief administrative officer, denied that the surplus prompted the proposal for the new plant.

Admits Plan Offers Solution

The Saugus plant “enables us to solve a problem in the sense that we had bought the turbine and couldn’t use it,” Michael said. “But we didn’t create the project . . . to make use of that turbine.”

Michael said the project, scheduled to be completed in late 1988, is part of a long-range effort by the county to make use of so-called co-generation technology, a means of recapturing heat from natural-gas turbines to produce greater amounts of electrical power.

The county began planning co-generation projects several years ago at a number of possible sites, including its existing indoor power plant at Hill and Temple streets in downtown Los Angeles and at the rural Saugus site in the Santa Clarita Valley, Michael said.

The Saugus project is expected to provide heating and cooling for the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho, a county jail housing 5,000 medium- to maximum-security inmates, said George Franceschini of the county’s facilities management department.

Surplus power from the plant will be sold to Southern California Edison in a deal that will reduce overall operating costs of the sprawling jail by about $4 million a year, Franceschini said.

Supervisors voted last year to put the other new gas turbine in the downtown power plant, where a series of steam boilers now provides power for 15 major county buildings, including the Hall of Administration and the Los Angeles Music Center, Michael said. That $35-million project is scheduled to be completed in 1989, he said.

Hahn’s aide expressed skepticism that either project will be worthwhile, saying revenue projections for the sale of electrical power may be overly optimistic in the wake of the failed contract with the city. “It’s a tricky business to predict,” Wolf said.