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Prison Battle: Deukmejian in a Test of Wills With Roberti

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Times Staff Writer

As lawmakers and Gov. George Deukmejian intensified their political gamesmanship this week over the Administration’s embattled Los Angeles prison plan, the debate has turned into a wrestling match between two of the state’s most powerful political leaders.

On one side is the Republican governor, who has steadfastly refused to bargain on his proposal for a new prison on the city’s Eastside. As Deukmejian campaigns throughout California, he bluntly warns voters about the state’s unchecked prison population and the dangers of failing to build new lockups for hundreds of convicts who enter the corrections system each week.

On the other side is Sen. President Pro Tem David A. Roberti, a Los Angeles Democrat who, by repeatedly defying the governor, has assured his own Democratic members will be criticized in an election year as law-and-order obstructionists. But Roberti also sees political advantage in supporting Latino opponents who do not want the prison built near their community.

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“What we are now seeing is essentially a political test of wills on this issue,” said Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp, a Democrat who says he strongly supports construction of a prison in Los Angeles County but says he will leave it to the Legislature to decide exactly where.

Despite the potential hazards for each leader, the result has been a political standoff, obscured by bitter accusations on both sides. With the November elections on the horizon, however, there also is a growing belief in each camp that there is as much political advantage in a stalemate as in resolving the long-festering dispute.

“It’s a win-win situation,” said one associate of the governor who asked not to be identified. “It affords an opportunity for the governor to be highly visible and highly vocal on one of his strength issues.”

Roberti, downplaying any gubernatorial advantage, countered: “The governor has tried to raise the attention span. But every time he does, I suspect the average man or woman on the street asks, ‘Why not put (the prison) in the boonies; why put it here where people live?’ ”

The debate over the Los Angeles prison has been a political roller coaster from the start.

Amid solid opposition among Los Angeles County’s elected leaders to every suggested prison site, the state Department of Corrections settled on a parcel in an industrial area two miles southeast of the Civic Center and right across the Los Angeles River from the the city’s major Latino population center.

At first, there was little vocal opposition. The Senate, after winning a series of concessions from the governor, unanimously approved the prison plan, only to see it bottled up on the last night of the Legislature’s 1985 session by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco).

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Later, the proposal became entangled in gubernatorial politics as Mayor Tom Bradley, Deukmejian’s Democratic opponent, lambasted the Eastside prison location and suggested that it be placed in a Republican district near the Magic Mountain amusement park in Saugus.

Prospects for passage appeared dim until July, when Brown, in a sudden switch, sided with the governor and the measure went sailing out of the Assembly. Legislative sources said the Speaker’s reversal was in retaliation for Democratic Assemblywoman Gloria Molina’s active support of an Assembly candidate Brown opposed. The prison site is within Molina’s Los Angeles district.

But Brown’s actions had the unexpected result of mobilizing community opposition to the prison. By the time the Senate was scheduled to vote final passage, support for the plan had seriously eroded.

To Deukmejian’s frustration, Roberti has framed the debate in racial and partisan terms, deriding the Administration’s plan as a Republican “vendetta” aimed at penalizing the heavily Democratic Eastside community. To prove that he has no objection to the concept of a Los Angeles prison, Roberti is now pushing for a second lockup in a Republican area of the county.

The most anyone expects from this political juggling act is a Democratic-crafted bill that Deukmejian is almost sure to veto.

“Both sides would like to get this over with,” said a dejected Sen. Robert Presley, a Riverside Democrat who has been carrying the governor’s prison plan for nearly two years and is still searching for a compromise. “My feeling is after a while this begins to appear ridiculous. Then, instead of being a positive political issue, it begins to be a negative one.”

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For now at least, Deukmejian appears intent on using the issue not only in his own reelection campaign but to bolster Republican hopes of winning additional seats in the Senate.

With 16 of the Democrats’ 26 Senate seats up for election in November and Republicans seven seats away from a majority in the upper house, Deukmejian has begun campaigning hard on the prison issue in the districts of Senate Democrats who have not strongly supported his plan.

Early Opposition

The governor also seems intent on keeping Bradley’s name visible in the prison debate--using the mayor’s early opposition to the Eastside prison site as evidence that he is soft on crime and more concerned about Los Angeles than the rest of the state.

“If the governor loses on (the prison issue), then I know what he will do,” said Senate GOP Caucus Chairman John Seymour of Anaheim. “He will use that as an issue to beat Roberti and Senate Democrats and, secondarily, Tom Bradley over his unwillingness to allow a prison in Los Angeles at the expense of communities elsewhere in the state.”

Another Deukmejian strategist said polling data indicates that Bradley is vulnerable outside the Los Angeles metropolitan area to any suggestion that his real interest lies in protecting his home city.

Voter Motivation

Democrats in the Senate, meanwhile, are counting on their opposition to an Eastside prison to motivate Latinos and other strongly Democratic groups to turn out in greater numbers for the November elections.

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Although Deukmejian had hoped to cultivate more Latino voters this year, a Los Angeles Times Poll last week showed that the governor had lost 31 percentage points among that group since March. By last week, Bradley had a lead of 46% to 23% over Deukmejian among Latinos.

Deukmejian strategists say normally Democratic Latino voters are simply responding to a more aggressive Bradley campaign. But Roberti said he is convinced that the prison issue is galvanizing Latino voters, not just in Los Angeles, but throughout California.

“It’s an issue of fair treatment,” he said.

Republican Hope

As the campaign continues, however, Republican supporters of the governor’s prison plan are hoping the pressure exerted by Deukmejian will eventually cause the Senate’s Democratic Caucus to splinter, forcing Roberti to either give in or place his leadership post in jeopardy.

But Roberti, who survived an uprising in January by moderate and conservative Democrats over what they called his liberal agenda, insists that he is in no danger of being ousted.

“Every time I do something that if done by anybody else in my position would be considered strong, I get to read about my leadership being weakened,” Roberti complained. “I’m as much in the lead as ever.”

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