Jury Report: None Exempt From County Growth Pains

Too much growth and too little planning affects everyone from “the bag lady on the street to the developer that lives on top of the hill,” the outgoing foreman of the Orange County Grand Jury said Thursday.

Two weeks before the official expiration of the 1986-87 jury’s term, Foreman James V. Robinson II presented county supervisors with copies of all the jury’s reports, covering topics from data processing to jail overcrowding, from transit to welfare programs.

“Most of our reports on these subjects have generated some controversy, a few of them considerable controversy,” Robinson told the five supervisors, some of whom had criticized the jury’s reports.

“We are pleased with this,” he said. “For out of controversy comes thoughtful discussion between all concerned. And thoughtful discussion will lead us to the best methods of dealing with the issues that have been raised.”

Board of Supervisors Chairman Roger R. Stanton praised the grand jurors for their hard work and said their wisdom and experience was “unsurpassed.”

‘Ivory-Tower Nonsense’

Stanton had been the severest critic of the key grand jury report, which had recommended an overhaul of government so that the supervisors could concentrate on planning while a county executive officer could deal more with the daily functionings of government.

Stanton said that report was “simplistic” and relied on a study of Orange County government by four Claremont College professors that was “an ivory-tower piece of nonsense.”

Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez thanked the panel for its work and said the public “places a great deal of confidence” in the grand jury’s comments.

Robinson said he thought some previous grand juries “have tended to focus on problems that in our view were more symptomatic than they were fundamental.”

He and this year’s other grand jurors decided instead to focus “on a few basic issues and to see what might develop as a result of our analysis of those issues.”

Robinson told reporters that “the No. 1 problem facing the county is too much growth, not enough planning. And that cuts all the way across, right down to the bag lady on the street, to the developer that lives on top of the hill.”

Robinson sounded a perennial lament of grand jurors, that much of their time in the early months of their yearlong term is consumed in learning just what county government is, does and should do. By the time they focus on problems, their terms are running out.

He said that for what he believed was the first time in state history, the Superior Court judge who impanels the grand jury told the outgoing group to spend two weeks in daily meetings with the incoming group. Those meetings began Monday.

“It is our hope that through the orientation period we can hasten (the new grand jurors’) development as a group and hasten their collective insight into the problems of government and the structure of government,” Robinson said.

If all goes well when the new panel takes office on July 1, he said, “they will be prepared very quickly to begin to raise some of the questions that need to be raised.”