Gates Turns Up Heat on Supervisors for Tax Vote : Jails: A poll showing wide support for increase to fund new facility revitalizes the sheriff. But the board remains dubious, and it must decide next week.

Sheriff Brad Gates stepped up his campaign for a May 14 sales tax vote Tuesday, but even as he did, some county officials were expressing doubts about whether a measure can be put together in time.

Financial, legal and political questions cloud the issue, which already has touched off considerable debate at the county Hall of Administration. That debate will peak in the coming days, as supervisors must decide quickly whether to follow Gates’ recommendation and schedule the special election.

Although the supervisors have until Feb. 15 to make a decision, only one more board meeting is scheduled between now and then. The supervisors meet next Tuesday, but will not hold a session on Feb. 12, so next week is the final opportunity for them to approve a May 14 election.

That gives them less than a week to consider a proposal that could shape the future of the county’s law enforcement efforts.

“It would be very difficult to put a package together in that amount of time,” Board Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez said. “There’s a lot of language that has to go together, and there’s a lot of legal issues out there.”

Gates, however, was optimistic that the questions can be resolved and enthusiastic about the half-cent tax’s potential for dealing with the county’s mounting problem of jail overcrowding. More than 4,400 prisoners typically are housed in Orange County’s five jails, which are designed to hold 3,203.

Thousands of inmates are released prematurely every year to make room for more serious offenders, a policy that meets with strong public disapproval.

To resolve the problem of overcrowding and end the early release programs that it has spawned, Gates strongly supports construction of a new jail in Gypsum Canyon, about 10 miles from downtown Anaheim. A majority of the county supervisors agree, but Vasquez and Supervisor Don R. Roth do not.

Gates launched the latest salvo in his campaign for a May 14 vote on Monday, one day after a Times Orange County Poll showed surprisingly strong support for a half-cent sales tax increase to pay for a new jail.

That same poll found that residents give Gates and the supervisors low marks for handling jail overcrowding, and some observers suggested Tuesday that Gates’ push for an election was undertaken partly to raise his public profile on the issue.

Gates denied that. “My track record for the past four years on this is pretty obvious,” the sheriff said. “I’m not after this thing for politics.”

Rather, Gates said, he is redoubling his efforts because the poll strengthened his impression that a tax could pass. And the revenue from a half-cent levy would supply the key component in a financing package that Gates said could be put together to pay for the land acquisition, construction and operation of a new jail in Gypsum Canyon.

“I think we can solve this problem with this tax,” Gates said. “If the members of the board apply their minds to it, we can make this work.”

Estimates of the cost of building and operating a new jail vary widely, but Gates said he believes that a 3,000-bed jail in Gypsum Canyon could be built for about $500 million. Operating costs are harder to figure but could easily top $100 million a year soon after the jail opens. They would grow with inflation and jail expansion.

The sales tax increase, Gates said, would produce about $244 million a year, an estimate based on projections by an Orange County Transportation Commission study in 1989 of the fund-raising potential of Measure M. That measure, which was approved by county voters in November, will raise the tax on retail sales from 6% to 6.5% beginning April 1.

According to the 1989 study, a half-cent tax would produce $158 million in 1991 and grow steadily to $513 million in 2010. Inflation and population growth would be responsible for the increase, but inflation would also mean that the money would buy less in coming years, as operation costs grow as well.

Further complicating the financing problems is the fact that revenue from the tax would be its lowest in the early years, when the county would need the money most to pay for buying the land and building the jail.

To address that, Gates proposed that the county issue bonds and sell at least two pieces of government-owned land: the James A. Musick Branch Jail near El Toro and the vacant Katella-Douglas site in Anaheim. Combined, he estimated that those two properties could raise $40 million to $52 million.

All of those elements add up to a complex package, and Vasquez warned that it may not be possible to assess its feasibility between now and next week.

“That is a very complex question, and one that would require a lot of analysis,” said Vasquez, who plans to meet with Gates later this week to discuss the package. “I’m not prepared to comment on that right now.”

Still, Gates argued that the supervisors must move quickly or risk seeing the tab for a new jail rise still higher.

“Every time we put this off, it costs the taxpayers of this county,” he said. “It’s not like this is crunch time because somebody just thought of this idea. We’ve been talking about it for years.”