Presley Plans to Push $500-Million Prison Bond Issue

Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), a key player in the Los Angeles prison dispute, said Thursday that he intends to propose a $500-million bond issue to finance expansion of the state’s overcrowded prison system, including a new penitentiary in a rural part of Los Angeles County.

Presley, the Senate’s chief negotiator on prison matters, said the state does not have enough money to build the penitentiaries needed to house the more than 700 felons who enter California’s already strained correctional system each month.

The most immediate need, he added, is money for a 2,200-cell rural facility, which has become a key bargaining chip in efforts to break a deadlock over the building of a prison in Los Angeles County. Gov. George Deukmejian has indicated support for building two prisons in the county, so long as one of them is on his preferred site on Los Angeles’ Eastside.

During a breakfast session with The Times Sacramento Bureau, Presley also said the rural prison probably will not be built in Castaic, as some Democratic lawmakers have urged. Instead, he indicated that Senate negotiators plan to select a site from among several previously studied locations near the Antelope Valley desert towns of Palmdale and Lancaster or in Gorman, a sparsely populated community in the mountains between Castaic and Bakersfield.

As of January, there were more than 59,000 inmates in California’s 13 prisons, a 19% increase in one year. Consequently, the corrections system, largest in the nation, is operating at 182% of capacity.

The Legislature already has agreed to spend more than $2 billion to build enough cells and provide prison camp space for 27,000 more inmates, but the prison population is expected to overwhelm these facilities by the end of the decade.

Voters have approved $1.3 billion in bonds to pay for the building effort. The rest of the money is to come from the state’s general fund and so-called lease-purchase bonds that can be issued without voter approval.

Presley said this should cover the costs of projects under construction or planned by the Department of Corrections. A rural Los Angeles prison is not included on that list, however, and could be expected to add $130 million to $150 million in costs, he said.

“It looks like we are going to have to do another bond issue in 1988,” Presley said.

According to Presley, the major stumbling block to the two-prison concept is the governor’s insistence that an environmental impact report required for the Eastside prison not delay the project.

“I think we’re going to be able to get pretty close to what (Deukmejian) wants,” Presley predicted.

Senate negotiators had decided to leave the specific location of the rural prison vague, allowing corrections officials to name a site after the project is authorized. This policy reportedly has, however, drawn opposition from public officials who represent the vast rural portions of the county, any of whom could end up with the prison in their district.

By naming a specific site, Presley said, he hopes to quell opposition from officials whose districts are no longer targeted. “When you narrow it down, you narrow the opposition,” Presley said. “That’s a big change from where we were before.”

A spokesman for the Department of Corrections said the state has evaluated and rejected one site in Gorman and three in Palmdale because of flooding problems. At least five others in the Lancaster area were studied, he said, but no recommendations were made.

Sen. President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles) and several Democrats in the Assembly had proposed building the rural prison on Los Angeles County-owned land at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho, north of Castaic.

Presley said he “would doubt” that the prison would be built there because, among other reasons, the land lies in a flood plain and atop several earthquake faults.