LOCAL ELECTIONS / CENTRALIZED JAIL INITIATIVE : Measure A Would Put All Lockups in Santa Ana

Santa Ana hopes it has a few friends in the rest of the county--and that those friends find their way to the polls June 5.

The central county city, with a densely packed, largely Spanish-speaking population of more than a quarter-million, is going to need some help from its neighbors if it is to defeat Measure A on the June 5 ballot.

The countywide measure, also known as the Centralized Jail Initiative, would make Santa Ana the site of any new jails that Orange County decides to build in the future, and it would ensure residents in the rest of the county that they will never have a new jail in their own back yards.

Measure A’s most important impact for its chief proponents--residents of Anaheim Hills and Yorba Linda--is that the county’s planned 6,700-bed jail would never be built in unincorporated Gypsum Canyon, the site the Board of Supervisors chose in 1987, almost 10 years after a federal judge had first ordered the county to alleviate jail overcrowding and improve inmates’ living conditions.

The board’s decision was bitterly opposed by residents near Gypsum Canyon, who then banded together and began the initiative drive that resulted in Measure A being placed on the ballot.

“Gypsum Canyon is not remote,” said Rick Violett, the Yorba Linda homeowner who heads the Measure A campaign. “There’s going to be thousands of homes staring right into the canyon. . . . It’s only remote to those people who don’t live up there.”

Violett and other Measure A proponents say that Santa Ana is the natural spot for any new jails because it is the county seat.

“There’s already a jail there . . . and that’s where the courts are,” Violett said. “That’s what urban centers are. You expect to have those kinds of things when you move next to the Civic Center.”

Santa Ana residents and politicians are vehemently opposed to the idea of putting another jail alongside the Central Men’s and Women’s jails and the Intake/Release Center that are already at the Civic Center complex. Building a new jail downtown would mean tearing out hard-to-replace, low-cost housing, they say, and there is no suitable site elsewhere in the city. Mayor Daniel E. Young and other opponents of the measure have accused its backers of racism in trying to shove a jail into a Latino community, a charge that Measure A backers deny.

But Santa Ana residents make up only about 10% of the county’s population, and their problem will be in persuading the rest of the county that there is a better place for the jail.

“We clearly need to make an appeal to voters outside Santa Ana,” said Dennis de Snoo, a Santa Ana-based political consultant to the No on M group. “We hope that people, especially in the south part of the county and along the coast, will recognize the waste in tax money that would be caused by this . . . flawed piece of legislation.”

To help them win over non-Santa Ana votes, Measure A opponents have enlisted Huntington Beach Councilman John Erskine and San Juan Capistrano Mayor Gary L. Hausdorfer, as well as the entire Fountain Valley City Council, in their campaign.

“My main concern is to see a jail built in this county,” Hausdorfer said. “The more we try to force it on . . . Santa Ana, the longer it will go. I would rather go to an outlying region where there’s a broader consensus to build it and get it done.”

Hausdorfer conceded that winning over South County residents won’t be easy. “Quite honestly, people will feel that as long as it’s not near them, they’re not likely to care where it goes.”

The No on A campaign, organized as Taxpayers Against Crime, has commitments for about $25,000, De Snoo said. “If we hit $30,000, I’ll be very happy,” he said, adding that even with that amount, reaching a million voters spread throughout the county will be difficult.

“We have to rely on volunteers and groups bordering Santa Ana,” De Snoo said.

Harvey Englander, consultant for the pro-Measure A campaign, said that although his clients had no trouble raising money two years ago and qualifying the initiative for the ballot, they are finding fund-raising more difficult as the election nears. Part of the difficulty, he said, lies in the Board of Supervisors’ recent shift in focus from Gypsum Canyon to Chairman Don R. Roth’s exploratory proposal to build a jail in the Riverside County desert.

“It’s difficult to maintain the excitement,” Englander said. “Because everyone is salivating at the concept of a desert jail, a lot of people feel we’ve already won the fight.”

Oddly, Measure A proponents support the concept of building a jail in the desert, even though one of their main arguments for locating it in Santa Ana is to keep a lid on transportation costs, freeway congestion and smog emissions caused by shuttling prisoners to and from court.

“Ship them out and leave them there,” Violett said. “If they have to go through an appeal, leave them in the county jail” in Santa Ana.

But Assistant Sheriff John (Rocky) Hewitt, administrator of the Central Jail complex, said that only about 55% of the county’s inmates at any time have been sentenced, and he estimated that 50% of those sentenced inmates make one or more court appearances during their stay.

Measure A opponents are hedging their bets too. While they criticize the initiative on the grounds that it would waste the $7 million the county has spent in studying the Gypsum Canyon site, they would not be averse to scrapping the project to build the remote desert jail. Supervisor Roger R. Stanton, whose district includes Santa Ana, attacks the measure because the county counsel’s office says it would preclude the county’s building a jail in the desert.

WHAT MEASURE A WOULD DO

Measure A on Orange County’s June 5 ballot provides that:

New Orange County jails will be located within Santa Ana.

Jails outside Santa Ana (Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange and James A. Musick Honor Farm near Irvine) will not be allowed to expand.

No jail will be built within 600 feet of any school.