U.S. Refuses to Give $7.2 Million for Tent City : Jails: The county’s grant application, which sought four times the amount of available funding, is rejected.

A plan to jail Ventura County’s casual drug users in a tent city, which would cost nearly four times the money available under a nationwide federal program, has been rejected as too expensive and outside grant-application guidelines, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The Office of Justice Programs sent a letter, dated Oct. 22, to Sheriff John V. Gillespie denying the $7.2-million grant application that he and Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury submitted last spring, said the project’s grant coordinator, Sheriff’s Lt. Michael Brown.

Of 63 applicants for the $2 million available nationwide under the Innovative Neighborhood Oriented Policing Programs, nine were awarded grants of $100,000 to $200,000 each, said Velva Walter, spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance.

The Ventura County Drug Control Strategy, as local officials have dubbed the tent city plan, was rejected because putting it into action would be too costly and would not focus primarily on drug education as required under the federal program, Walter said.

Brown said he had been unaware that the grant application was out of line because the office of Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) had assured the sheriff last spring that $58 million was available and had encouraged the county to apply for some of it.

“We were never told there was any kind of limit placed on the application,” Brown said.

A $7.2-million grant would have paid for more police officers to arrest casual drug users, more court staff to process their cases, a tent jail to house them and education programs to deter others from becoming casual drug users, Brown said.

“You get the feeling that maybe they’re not serious about the war on drugs,” Brown said of the Justice Department’s rejection of the county’s application. “But they can’t fund all of them. There were 63 applications.”

Gillespie could not be reached for comment Thursday. But Assistant Sheriff Richard Bryce, chief of the department’s custody division, expressed disappointment that the county program had been turned down for funding.

“It’s hard to get upset,” Bryce said Thursday. “We’re not going to give up on trying to find some sort of funding. We thought it was an opportunity for the federal government to show a direct link with local government in the war on drugs.”

But Bryce said there are few options now that the federal request has been denied and anti-drug-campaign funding was rejected Tuesday by California voters. Plus, he said, the Navy’s refusal last month to let the county build the tent city on land at the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Port Hueneme further frustrates the plan.

Bradbury said the government’s rejection was “disappointing but not unexpected. . . . We did not have high hopes of that kind of funding from the federal government.”

Bradbury said Gillespie told him Gallegly would see that the Ventura County plan was presented to William Bennett, head of the president’s office of National Drug Control Strategy. Bradbury said he attended a recent political function with Bennett, who announced Thursday that he plans to resign, and that the drug czar had not heard of the plan.

“I specifically asked him about our plan because I had been told it was going to be presented to him,” Bradbury said Thursday. “He was unaware of it but seemed very interested and asked me to get all the information to him, which I did 10 days ago.”

Gallegly said he does not know what led to the plan’s rejection. “But our office had corresponded with Bill Bennett’s office in an effort to get this into the hopper.”

However, Gallegly said he does not remember personally mentioning the plan to Bennett.

Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura) said he and Gallegly wrote letters in support of the program to the Justice Department on June 19 but heard nothing more until this week when they learned that the plan had been rejected.

Upon learning of the grant application’s failure, Ventura County Public Defender Kenneth I. Clayman said: “That’s good. I think it would have been a very wasteful thing.”

Clayman said he would rather the county focus on anti-drug education in the schools. “But to create a system to pump a whole new bunch of people into the criminal justice arena is not a good idea,” he said.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this story.