Officials Vow to Challenge Jail Measure in Santa Ana

Santa Ana city officials promised Monday to fight until all legal means are exhausted against an initiative that would prohibit building county jails outside the city limits.

Sponsors of the initiative turned in more than 112,000 signatures supporting a centralized jail last month, and the county Board of Supervisors today may either adopt the measure as law or schedule it for the next countywide election in June, 1990.

Santa Ana Vice Mayor Patricia A. McGuigan said she would urge the board to place the measure on the ballot and start building the planned 6,000-bed, maximum-security jail in Gypsum Canyon.

“It is the most logical and practical location in the county,” McGuigan said. “It’s not a reasonable request to put this in an urban setting.”

Proponents of the initiative have said building a jail in a remote part of the county would increase traffic and transportation costs as prisoners are shuttled to and from court. They said Santa Ana should accept the new jail as part of the responsibility that goes with being the county seat.

75% of Prisoners Already

But Santa Ana council members who gathered for a press conference Monday--Ron May, Wilson B. Hart and Dan Griset--said their city already houses about 75% of all prisoners in the county. And they pointed out that prisoners at the Gypsum Canyon jail will have been sentenced already and thus will not need to be near the courthouse.

Also, the costs of waging a lengthy legal battle over the initiative, should it pass, could prove high, they warned.

“We will use every political and legal means to resist this (initiative),” Griset said. “That means (a jail) won’t be built on a timely basis.”

Downtown Santa Ana is simply too crowded and land costs too high to make construction of a new jail there feasible, the council members said.