Irate Roth Forces County Rewrite of Report Opposing Desert Jail Site : Study: The supervisor firmly disputes contention by administrative staff that the plan is too costly. Revise is due in 60 days.

Supervisor Don R. Roth, expressing his deep disappointment in a county administrative office report that snubbed a desert jail proposal he strongly supports, led his colleagues Tuesday in sending the report back for more work.

“I frankly expected much more from the county report,” Roth said during a board session dominated by discussion of the controversial document. “I’m not sure what damage this report has done. . . . I just hope we can turn it around.”

Roth has questioned many aspects of the report, which staff members wrote after conducting a detailed, 10-month study of the desert jail proposal. The report concluded that utility and transportation costs at the proposed desert facility would make its operation so expensive that it should be dropped from any further consideration.

That conclusion infuriated Roth, who has focused much of his criticism on the report’s estimates of land values in Gypsum Canyon, east of Anaheim, and Chiriaco Summit, in Riverside County.

Backed by a local consulting firm that reviewed the staff report over the weekend, Roth, a former Anaheim mayor, has argued that buying land in Gypsum Canyon would be far more expensive than the report indicates; similarly, he said the price of land in Chiriaco Summit is much cheaper than the report states.

“I was fully expecting a feasibility study, but what the staff returned with is flawed,” Roth said, adding that Gypsum Canyon site costs were “unrealistically low, and I put that lightly.”

County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider told supervisors in a memo last week that Chiriaco Summit land prices were taken from data supplied by the First Boston Corp. The value for land in Gypsum Canyon came from a 1989 county study, Schneider said.

To bolster his case that the Chiriaco Summit land was overpriced in the county staff estimates, Roth brought with him to Tuesday’s session Margit Rusche, a lifelong Chiriaco resident who offered to sell her 800 acres in the area to Orange County for less than $2,000 an acre. The staff report had estimated land values in the desert at about $7,200 per acre.

“That’s ridiculous,” Rusche said following the board meeting. “Nobody’s getting that kind of money for land out there. There’s nothing on that land but the snakes and the lizards.”

Roth requested that the county administrative office review the criticisms of its work and report back to the board within 60 days.

The supervisors approved that request, and Schneider said he believed the work could be completed within that time.

Even supervisors who have supported construction of a jail in Gypsum Canyon backed Roth’s request. Supervisor Roger R. Stanton, for instance, urged Schneider to return with a broader set of estimates than are provided in the original document.

“Maybe you ought to give us a couple of different scenarios in terms of a high-end and a low-end cost,” Stanton said. “I think you ought to look at those concerns.”

Stanton and two other supervisors, Thomas F. Riley and Harriett M. Wieder, have voted to proceed with Gypsum Canyon as the site for the county’s next jail. But four votes are needed to condemn land, and both Roth and Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, whose district includes the Gypsum Canyon site, say they will not vote to do that.