Small Town Pays Big Price to Battle Jail : Santa Paula: The city of 25,000 expects to spend $90,000 on legal expenses in its lawsuit against the county.

A legal battle that has already cost Santa Paula $40,000 in attorneys’ fees is expected to become even more expensive in coming months as the city tries to stop the county from building a jail near Santa Paula, officials say.

City officials said the lawsuit, which was filed Jan. 23, has been a large expense for the small town of 25,000 residents. Santa Paula recently earmarked an additional $50,000 to cover the lawsuit expenses for the rest of the fiscal year.

“Any time you get in this $100,000 bracket, it certainly is a substantial outlay of cash. Santa Paula is not rich,” Councilman Wayne D. Johnson said.

The proposed jail would be built on a 157-acre lemon orchard on Todd Road south of the Santa Paula Freeway.

A hearing on the lawsuit is scheduled for Thursday in Ventura County Superior Court. The city wants a court order blocking the county from building the jail at the proposed site, said Rochelle Browne, special counsel for the city.

In addition, the city wants the court to rescind the county’s condemnation and purchase of the lemon orchard from Michael and Nancy Brucker, trustees of the Brucker family trust.

The city money spent for the lawsuit so far has all come from the city’s reserve funds, which total about $1.5 million. Neither the expense nor the prospect of fighting the county will deter the city from going forward with the lawsuit, Mayor Pro Tem Les H. Maland said.

“I said when we started this, ‘I am not in favor of governments suing each other.’ But if you don’t, you take things lying down,” he said.

The two main reasons for Santa Paula’s opposition, Maland said, are controlling growth in Santa Paula and preserving a five-mile stretch of greenbelt where the $52-million jail would be built.

The greenbelt lies between the cities of Ventura and Santa Paula. Both cities agreed in the mid-1960s to preserve the area for agriculture and open space, he said.

Construction of the two-story jail is expected to begin next spring and to last two years, project engineers said. The jail would house 752 inmates.

The county bought the Todd Road site for $2.9 million and plans to use 70 acres of it to build the jail. The other 87 acres would remain for agricultural use, county officials said.

But a plan to retain only some of the lemon trees is inadequate, said Santa Paula Councilwoman Margaret A. Ely. Farming has to have a “rather large buffer” from other uses to operate effectively, she said.

“We just feel anything that jeopardizes agriculture in our area is worth fighting,” she said. “It is a way of life that is fast disappearing. And you can’t get it back.”

City officials also contend that the jail will increase traffic and water usage and open the door to further development in the area. Santa Paula has not expanded much in the last 30 years, and that has been a conscious decision, they say.

“We really don’t want to have a lot of growth in Santa Paula. We fought a long time to keep it small and charming,” Ely said.

Dennis L. Slivinski, assistant county counsel, said the county is sympathetic to those concerns but must deal with other pressing issues, one of them an overcrowded jail.

The county’s central jail in Ventura often holds three times its 400-inmate capacity, officials said.

“The Board of Supervisors is faced with a critical need of inmate space. They balanced 70 or so acres against other community needs,” Slivinski said.

The county prepared an environmental study of five locations before it chose the property on Todd Road. But Santa Paula says in its lawsuit that the county failed to do a study that focused solely on the Todd Road site and said the failure violates the California Environmental Quality Act.

The Santa Paula lawsuit also contends that county officials did not follow proper procedure in amending the county General Plan to change the zoning on the proposed jail site from agricultural.

Slivinski discounted the lawsuit and said the county is continuing with its plans to build the jail.

“The county believes it did the proper environmental review,” he said. “I have seen a lot of these lawsuits. Some people are upset that they are going to have a jail in their locality.”