Report on Jail Is Ruled Adequate : Environmental study: Judge deals a blow to efforts to halt facility’s expansion.

Los Angeles County apparently defeated attempts by the city of Los Angeles to block expansion of the downtown Central Jail when a judge decided Wednesday that the county’s environmental impact report for the project is basically adequate.

Ruling that the county’s EIR was drawn up in good faith and is in compliance with the law, Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe nonetheless required the county to amend the report to better explain plans for parking and for satisfying fire officials’ demands for increased hydrant capacity. The amendments must be submitted by Jan. 30, 1991.

The ruling was a defeat for the city and two neighborhood groups that filed the suit in hopes of blocking expansion of the facility on grounds that the county’s environmental assessment was inadequate.

A 2,408-bed addition to the downtown jail was approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors last August as the cornerstone of a $600-million plan to ease severe overcrowding in the county’s eight-jail system.

Designed to house about 13,500 prisoners, the system is being called upon to hold more than half again that many, with inmates at the Central Jail forced to sleep in hallways, day rooms and even the jail chapel.

The Central Jail expansion calls for erection of a two-story inmate reception center flanked by two concrete towers--seven and eight stories tall--on what is now a parking lot across Bauchet Street from the existing facility. A jail hospital would be housed in a five-story tower at the back of the complex.

Charging that the expansion would “hurt business and jeopardize the safety of residents,” the Los Angeles City Council last September directed the city attorney’s office to mount a legal challenge to the project.

City Councilwoman Gloria Molina complained that communities near the jail have become “dumping grounds” for jails and prisons that are successfully spurned by residents of more affluent areas of the county.

Deputy City Atty. William Childs argued Wednesday that the EIR was a “bad-faith” and “factually silly” effort by the county to justify expansion of the downtown facility without adequately measuring the adverse impact it would have on the community or properly addressing the potential for expansion on other sites.

Elwood Lui, a private attorney representing the county, countered that the report was a good-faith effort by the county and said the county was prepared to “shore up” any deficiencies cited by Judge Yaffe.

In issuing his ruling, Yaffe said that under the “rules of the game” set by the U.S. Supreme Court, he must base his decision on the sufficiency of the EIR as an informational document, without weighing whatever conclusions the report may have drawn.

He said that while the report did have shortcomings as to parking and water supplies, those faults could be corrected through the amendments he has ordered.