County Nears Resolution of Jail Site Controversy : Corrections: Supervisors may act Dec. 18 to affirm support for Gypsum Canyon location.

After years of bickering over where to put a new jail, three of the five county supervisors declared Wednesday that they are prepared to take a vote next month that could clear the way for a massive facility on the outskirts of Anaheim.

The supervisors are scheduled to take up the issue Dec. 18 and appear likely to support building the controversial Gypsum Canyon jail, a 6,720-bed facility slated for a site about 10 miles east of Anaheim.

Such an action still would leave huge obstacles in the way of building that jail; no source of funding, for instance, has yet been identified. But it would put to rest the only major alternative--a Riverside County desert jail proposal long touted by board Chairman Don R. Roth. A board vote at that session also could head off further moves by the city of Anaheim to annex the site and take it out of the county’s reach.

“The priority now is that we come to some resolution of this problem,” said Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, who supports building the Gypsum Canyon jail. “I hope we can take action quickly.”

The timetable is being forced by the supervisors’ need to demonstrate to a federal judge that they are moving ahead on the issue. The judge, who has handled jail overcrowding cases in Orange County for more than a decade, recently ordered a federal monitor to inspect the county’s five facilities and report on conditions as well as progress toward breaking the Gypsum Canyon stalemate.

In 1987, three supervisors voted to support Gypsum Canyon, but two--Roth and Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez--opposed it. It takes four votes to acquire property through condemnation, however, and the board has remained stymied at 3 to 2 ever since.

While the supervisors have argued about where to put a major new facility, jail overcrowding has reached a critical point--more than 4,400 prisoners are packed into a system designed for 3,203, and thousands more are released early every year to free up scarce jail beds.

Riley’s comments Wednesday were echoed by other top county officials and came in the wake of a draft report prepared by the county administrative office and circulated to county supervisors Tuesday. Although still subject to review by the board, that report concluded that the Riverside County jail proposal would be exorbitantly expensive to build and operate.

“The report’s findings give us the impetus and the opportunity to go forward with Gypsum Canyon aggressively,” Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder said. “I don’t see why we have to wait.”

Supervisor Roger R. Stanton said that he expects to join Riley and Wieder in voting to drop the desert jail proposal and proceed with Gypsum Canyon.

“I’ve got to take the recommendations of the staff very seriously, and I realize that we’re at the point where we absolutely have to do something,” Stanton said.

The same report that criticized the desert jail also cautioned that the county does not have money for Gypsum Canyon either. Because of that finding, the supervisors are being asked to scale back the 6,720-bed jail proposal, perhaps by phasing in the development rather than building the whole facility at once.

Roth, chairman of the board and the leading proponent of the desert jail, declined to comment on the draft report. Instead, the supervisor angrily demanded to know how its findings had become public.

“I resent that somebody leaked it. . . . I have no tolerance for this type of skulduggery,” Roth said in a brief interview. “What it was intended to be is a preliminary copy for the board to look at and review in case there are huge, glaring errors.”

Roth added that he has not had a chance to study the report--a 54-page, detailed set of findings and recommendations--and would withhold any comments about its conclusions until after he has done so.

Riley, however, said the time has come to move beyond debate about the desert jail.

“I have great admiration and certainly thank Don Roth for his efforts to move out to the desert, but it seems that there are real problems with that,” said Riley, who usually sides with Roth on matters before the board.

As the supervisors wrestled with the implications of the report, much attention focused on one section of it and its potential for breaking the logjam on the Gypsum Canyon jail. According to the study, the county could help pay for building Gypsum Canyon by closing down the James A. Musick Branch Jail near El Toro and selling that land.

Both Gypsum Canyon and the Musick facility are in Vasquez’s district. By creating a situation in which Vasquez could take a jail out of South County in exchange for building a new one near Anaheim, supporters of the Gypsum Canyon jail may have left the supervisor in a politically tenuous position.

If Vasquez votes against Gypsum Canyon, he may face the wrath of his South County constituents, who could blame him for passing up the opportunity to remove a jail from their neighborhood. If he votes for Gypsum Canyon, residents living near Anaheim may hold him responsible, but many of those residents are in Roth’s district.

Vasquez was unavailable for comment Wednesday.