Proposed Jail Site in Anaheim Passes Environmental Test

Building a 1,581-inmate maximum-security jail near Anaheim Stadium will have no significant adverse environmental effect, planners concluded in a draft of a report to the Orange County Board of Supervisors released Wednesday.

Nor, based on experience at prison sites elsewhere in the nation, will the jail be likely to decrease property values or increase crime in the area, the report said.

“In terms of purely environmental impacts, they’re almost negligible,” Michael M. Ruane of the Orange County Environmental Management Agency said in summarizing the report. “Nothing new came out as a fatal flaw.”

The public has 45 days to comment on the draft of the report. The supervisors are expected to certify it in final form in November.

Notes Opposition

Ruane noted, as the report did, that the proposal to build the jail at Katella Avenue and Douglass Road has drawn fierce opposition from Anaheim residents and businessmen, but he said the basis of the attacks was economic or sociological, not environmental.

The report, prepared by LSA, a Newport Beach firm, said “areas of controversy do not necessarily reflect physical environmental effects” it addresses.

The study took note of concerns that building the $141-million jail half a mile from Anaheim Stadium, home of the Los Angeles Rams professional football team and the California Angels professional baseball team, could increase crime or lower property values.

But it said studies in Florida, Canada, Wisconsin, California and Alabama showed that “real estate values tend to increase slightly within the proximity of the prison facility. A prison’s presence does not appear to have been a deterrent to development in any city.”

“In nearly every case studied, the values of the properties within three miles of the prison had risen more than the properties in the same communities further away,” the report said. “In addition, every study showed that there is no direct evidence that a prison produces an increase in local crime.”

Challenge From Opposition

But those statements were quickly challenged by a leading member of the Jail Action Committee, a coalition of Anaheim residents and businesses including Disneyland, the Rams and Angels and others opposing the Katella-Douglass site.

“We have a significant amount of information that runs pretty contrary to their statement that there’s no crime around the jail site,” said Floyd Farano, an Anaheim attorney who is chairman of the committee’s strategic planning subcommittee.

“I don’t think you have to look much further than the area around Santa Ana itself, the downtown site” of the county’s main jail, Farano said. “Is someone going to tell me there’s no crime around there?”

The Jail Action Committee said last month that it has raised about $80,000 so far and has hired experts on environmental studies and on jail construction to prepare independent reports.

Farano said the county report had been shipped to the committee’s consultants for study.

State Sen. John Seymour (R-Anaheim), a staunch opponent of the Anaheim Stadium jail site, said: “It doesn’t surprise me that they’ve come back with a report that says that site is environmentally sound.

“I wish they would prepare an economic impact report on that site because an economic impact study would show that it is an economic disaster to waste such a site, in what Anaheim calls its ‘platinum triangle,’ on a jail.”

Seymour repeated his charge that the supervisors’ selection of the site was “predestined by the lame duck status of Supervisor Ralph Clark.” Clark is retiring this year as the supervisor representing the 4th District, which includes Anaheim.

The supervisors picked the Anaheim Stadium site, which formerly was used as a trash transfer location, as the best site for a new jail on March 18. The site was on a list of county-owned property, and the board ordered environmental studies of it and three other locations, one in Anaheim and two in Santa Ana.

sh No Adverse Effects

The report released Wednesday foresees no significant adverse environmental effects if any of the other locations is chosen. But a four-member coalition of the Board of Supervisors has been adamant since March about sticking with the Anaheim Stadium site. On the board, only Clark has opposed it.

During the most recent session of the Legislature, an amendment to a statewide jail-financing bill was passed, prohibiting the use of state funds for a jail at the Anaheim Stadium site. Gov. George Deukmejian allowed that measure to become law without signing it.

The governor’s actions did not surprise any of the supervisors who support the stadium site, and they all continue to say the jail still can be built there despite the absence of state funds.

“I don’t know where they are going to get the money to build it,” Seymour said. “The only place they can get the money to build it is off the backs of the Orange County taxpayers. And I don’t think the Orange County taxpayers will stand for it.”

Study Ordered

Supervisors have ordered county staff to study means of financing jail facilities without state funds.

County officials consistently have limited their discussion of potential sites for a new jail to county-owned property to facilitate attempts to build quickly, an important concern because of pressure from U.S. District Judge William P. Gray to end overcrowding at the main jail in Santa Ana.

In March 1985 Gray found the supervisors in contempt of court for not complying with his 1978 order to improve conditions at the Santa Ana facility. He fined the county, installed an overseer to inspect the jail and set deadlines for lowering the inmate count.

The supervisors expanded branch jails to hold more inmates and decided on the Anaheim Stadium site for the new jail. They also continued a decade-long search for a remote site for a jail that would hold 5,000 or more inmates.

Dan Wooldridge, a spokesman for Clark, said Wednesday that the supervisor still believes that, despite the findings in the draft of the environmental impact report, “there will be no urban site jail built in Orange County.”

The report “has no big surprises,” Wooldridge said, “but must be looked at in the context of a series of critical decisions the board will be making in November.”

Times staff writer Kenneth F. Bunting contributed to this story.