County Prison Site to Get Assembly ‘Rubber Stamp’

Democratic Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) said Thursday that the Assembly will “rubber stamp” whatever Los Angeles County prison site the Senate wants to pick, including a Castaic location favored by Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti.

“We will approve whatever comes over from the Senate,” Brown (D-San Francisco) told a Los Angeles Times Sacramento bureau breakfast. “We believe the prison siting problem is between the governor and the Senate. It is their issue. We will simply rubber stamp whatever the Senate does.”

Roberti (D-Los Angeles) and Gov. George Deukmejian have been locked in a bitter battle over where in Los Angeles County to put a state prison. Deukmejian wants it in Los Angeles’ Eastside on a site that was recently sold to a private party. The sale represented a setback for the governor, although the Administration could file a condemnation suit to obtain the property.

Roberti vigorously opposes putting the prison at that location, two miles southeast of the Civic Center near the heavily Latino community of Boyle Heights. He prefers a location at Castaic, in the northern end of the county in the Los Angeles supervisorial district represented by Mike Antonovich, a former Republican Assemblyman who adamantly opposes putting it there.

The Castaic site also would be located in the Senate district of Republican Sen. Ed Davis, the former Los Angeles police chief. Davis also opposes the Castaic site.

Asked Thursday if he had enough votes to get the proposed Castaic legislation out of the Senate, Roberti said, “It’s going to be close.” The Senate leader indicated that the Castaic site previously was considered by the Department of Corrections and was ranked second on the list of proposed sites.

Settling the site dispute is particularly important because under existing state law two other new penitentiaries now nearly completed--one near San Diego and the other near Stockton--cannot accept inmates until a location is selected for the Los Angeles prison.

In his State-of-the-State address Wednesday, the governor unequivocally declared that he would not give up on trying to obtain the Eastside prison site.

But Brown said, “The whole world knows that (Eastside) site is gone.” He added: “If I were doing it, I would put that (Castaic) site in a bill and put it on the governor’s desk. . . . I’m sure there are (the necessary) 41 (Assembly) votes for it.”

Brown also predicted that Assemblywoman Gloria Molina (D-Los Angeles), with whom he has had strained political relations, will not play a major role in any legislative negotiations. Molina has made opposition to the Eastside site a major issue in her campaign for a City Council seat, and has attempted to take some credit for blocking the prison construction.

But Brown, in reply to a question, said, “Gloria Molina will have the same (one) vote she had before and the same number of people following her leadership--eight or nine people at the most.”

Brown said he didn’t see anything wrong with the Assembly simply “rubber stamping” the Senate’s choice for a Los Angeles prison site.

“We have handed the (prison) issue to them as they on occasion have handed other issues to us,” Brown said.

A coalition of East Los Angeles community groups, meanwhile, expressed outrage over Deukmejian’s persistence in seeking to build a prison on the Eastside.

The groups also vowed to step up its lobbying of the Legislature to stop a “stubborn and irrational chief executive of our state in trying to circumvent democracy,” said Steve Kasten, chairman of the Coalition Against the Prison, at a press conference in Los Angeles.

“No elected representative can go against an entire community,” asserted Kasten, who also is president of the Lincoln Heights Chamber of Commerce. “It is arrogant of the governor, and we cannot allow him to be a dictator.”

The Rev. Mark Valdez of the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice likened Deukmejian to “the guy who’s going after Moby Dick. He’s looking for trouble.”