County Rejects Proposal to End Tax Agreement : Annexation: There was little direct reference to the Gypsum Canyon jail debate during the session, but it loomed in the background.

The County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday rejected a plan that could have bottled up Anaheim’s efforts to annex Gypsum Canyon, where the county hopes to build a jail.

The decision, which came on a rare tie vote, removes one potential obstacle in the way of Anaheim’s effort to annex the property and clear it for a huge Irvine Co. housing development, an 8,000-unit project known as Mountain Park.

If it is approved, the annexation will make it much more difficult for the county to use the site for a jail. A majority of the county supervisors support the idea of putting a jail there.

The proposal the board rejected would have terminated a longstanding agreement between the county and Anaheim as to how property taxes collected from unincorporated areas of the county would be divided between the two governments after annexation. The agreement gives the county most of those proceeds; the rejected proposal recommended that the county seek an even greater percentage.

Although there was little direct reference to the Gypsum Canyon jail debate during Tuesday’s session, it clearly loomed in the background, and it was reflected in the final vote.

Supervisors Roger R. Stanton and Harriett M. Wieder, two supporters of Gypsum Canyon as a jail site, voted in favor of the recommendation to break the tax-sharing agreement and renegotiate with the city. That process could have taken an indefinite amount of time and could have stalled the annexation proposal while the county worked to acquire the canyon site for a jail.

But Supervisor Don R. Roth, who vigorously opposes the Gypsum Canyon jail proposal, excoriated the county administrative office for its handling of the proposal.

Roth said he pulled the item off the consent agenda “to express my objections and my annoyance. . . . This is bad business and a bad way to run a government.”

Specifically, Roth and other board members worried that Anaheim officials had had too little time to respond to the proposal, which was added to the supervisors’ agenda late Friday.

Roth was joined in opposing the recommendation by Board Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez, another Gypsum Canyon jail opponent, who said he was “very, very troubled” by the proposal.

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, who strongly supports putting a jail in the canyon, was absent from Tuesday’s meeting as he continues to recover from recent open-heart surgery. His absence proved meaningful, as his would have been the deciding one.

Tie votes mean that the proposal fails, so the motion before the board was defeated.