Supervisors Tentatively OK 35 Escondido Courtrooms

In a move to relieve the crush of overcrowded courts in North County, the county Board of Supervisors gave tentative approval Tuesday to a plan to place 35 courtrooms in Escondido in a lease-back arrangement with a private developer.

The unanimous vote was a compromise to mollify coastal North County judges and attorneys who had objected to transferring the courts from their current site in Vista to the inland Escondido site because of the distance from their offices and clients.

The Escondido courtroom proposal was floated earlier this year by Lusardi Construction Co., which said it would build a 10-story, $30-million courthouse and a $20-million office tower across the street from the Civic and Cultural Center now under construction in downtown Escondido. The original proposal called for providing space for 50 courtrooms.

Ken Lounsbery, vice president of Lusardi Construction Co., told supervisors that the new proposal was a bargain and “an innovative solution” to the present overcrowded court calendars. Under a court-sharing plan adapted from Canadian court practices, he said, 50 judges could utilize the court space--a practice now in operation in Ottawa and Montreal.

Financial Arrangement

The proposal includes a complicated financial arrangement that involves the Lusardi firm as builders, the Escondido redevelopment agency and the county, which would lease the courtrooms for 30 years at about $2.4 million a year. That cost--$1.30 per square foot--is well below present rental rates for office space, Lounsbery said.

While the state Legislature has not yet appropriated funds for any new North County judgeships, a state study projects that by the year 2000 there should be 50 additional judges in the North County.

Vista Mayor Gloria McClellan conceded Tuesday that the need for additional courtrooms outweighed her city’s concerns about not being the exclusive North County court site.

“My concern is for public safety first of all,” she said, citing the need for more courts and additional jail space.

Delayed Final Action

Lounsbery said that the scaled-down courthouse and an adjacent parking garage would be built and ready for use by January, 1991, if supervisors acted promptly. Board members, however, delayed final action on the project until Dec. 8, when a county staff study of the feasibility of the proposal will be presented.

Escondido Councilman Doug Best said that his city favors the project because it would boost present efforts to revitalize the downtown area and would “enhance the city’s prominence in North County.”

Municipal Judge Suzanne Knauf, speaking for North County judges, endorsed the court-sharing proposal and asked supervisors to adopt “a long-term solution rather than a Band-Aid approach” to courts overcrowding.

Supervisor John MacDonald, whose district includes most of the North County, conceded that protests from coastal attorneys had “melted away” with the decision to retain courts in Vista, but warned that the “bottom line is whether or not we (the county) can afford this solution.”