Governor Criticizes County’s Bid to Block Prison

With the deadline approaching for legal action against a proposed Lancaster state prison, Gov. George Deukmejian criticized the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors Thursday for trying to block the prison with a planned lawsuit.

“Other regions of California house a fair share of state prison inmates, but officials in Los Angeles County continue to duck responsibility for their own felons,” Deukmejian said in a prepared statement, which also said that nearly 40% of state inmates are from Los Angeles County.

“To delay prison construction further is to endanger the stability of the state prison system,” he said. “This is a critical public safety issue being cynically manipulated with ridiculous arguments.”

County lawyers plan to file suit Monday opposing the 2,200-bed maximum- and medium-security prison, which is designated for a site now owned by the county. Led by Supervisor Mike Antonovich, county officials assert the prison will deprive the county of land needed to expand adjacent health care, fire, criminal justice and animal control facilities.

In addition, attorneys for the city of Lancaster plan to file a lawsuit today challenging a state environmental study that found the prison will not have a negative impact on Lancaster’s infrastructure and economy. The deadline for legal action is Monday.

Deukmejian said Thursday that prisons are “economic boons” to communities. The construction of expensive homes next to the state prison in Folsom disproves the notion that prisons discourage housing and economic development, he said.

The governor did not specifically mention the protests by the city of Lancaster, but his statements drew criticism from Danielle Marvin Lewis, head of a Lancaster committee opposing the prison. Lewis said the Republican governor had further alienated residents of the staunchly Republican Antelope Valley, whom she said the governor had “sacrificed” in a 1986 bipartisan agreement with state legislators to build the Lancaster prison along with a prison in predominantly Democratic East Los Angeles.

Antonovich spokesman Dawson Oppenheimer said the governor had not addressed the basis of county opposition, which he said was the loss of land needed to expand services in the fast-growing valley.

“The state has an ideal state-owned location in Hungry Valley,” Oppenheimer said, referring to an alternative county site near Gorman that has been suggested.

Although county officials and Lancaster activists said it is not too late for the state to reconsider the Hungry Valley site, Deukmejian spokesman Robert Gore said the governor termed such suggestions, along with recent legal action by the city of Los Angeles against the East Los Angeles prison site, as “frivolous.”

“This is not a partisan political issue,” Gore said. “It is a criminal justice issue.”