OK Likely on Gypsum Canyon Home Plan : Development: Anaheim’s City Council appears united in preference of 8,000 homes to a new county jail. Council will vote on the project Tuesday.

On a joyous May evening in Mayor Fred Hunter’s downtown law office, residents of the city’s upscale Anaheim Hills area, developers, civic leaders and a majority of the City Council gathered for a toast.

The party was a celebration of the stunning defeat of a tax proposal to finance construction of a county jail in Anaheim’s back yard, and it effectively erased all doubt as to how the council is expected to vote Tuesday on a plan to cover Gypsum Canyon with 8,000 homes.

Perhaps never before has the council been as united in its resolve to move ahead with such a massive development, which deals a serious blow to the county’s efforts to capture the canyon for a 6,720-bed jail or a new landfill--or both.

“There is absolute unanimity on this,” Councilman William D. Ehrle said Friday. “Council approval of this project is like the first shovelful of dirt coming out of the ground. This project is going to move forward.”

A measure of the council’s unity could even be detected in the voice of the Irvine Co. executive who successfully escorted the 3,179-acre Mountain Park plan through the Planning Commission. And after private meetings with individual council members last week, the company official reported “feeling very good about Tuesday night.”

“I’m not expecting any big surprises or controversies,” said C. Bradley Olson, president of Foothill Community Builders. “It’s pretty quiet out there.”

Indeed, with the exception of some conservationists who reluctantly would rather see a jail in the canyon, the biting rhetoric that characterized the unsuccessful campaign to pass Measure J--the tax measure that would have financed construction of the new jail--has all but passed.

Yet proponents of the jail project for Gypsum Canyon say the recent silence should not be interpreted as a sign of concession.

Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates, one of the strongest supporters of Measure J, still refers to the canyon as the “only site we’ve got to deal with” and warns that it would take another decade to find an alternative.

“Right now, we’re releasing 850 people a week,” Gates said, referring to the county’s overcrowding problems at its jails. “These are people who should be in jail. It’s hard to say what another 10 years of that would do for the community.”

What Gates and other jail supporters are banking on is legislation now awaiting state Senate approval that would make it easier for the county to use its powers of condemnation to claim the canyon property as its own.

Written by Assemblyman Tom Umberg (D-Garden Grove), the bill, if approved, would allow for condemnation on a vote of just three of the five Orange County supervisors. Currently, it takes a vote of four. The bill is seen as a tool to break the wall thrown up by Board of Supervisors Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez and Supervisor Don R. Roth, a former Anaheim mayor, who oppose the Gypsum Canyon jail proposal.

George Urch, Umberg’s chief of staff, said that the bill is awaiting action on the Senate floor but that because of the protracted state budget discussions, the legislation has been backlogged and may not be considered until at least the end of August.

Although the canyon sits outside the Anaheim city limits, it is within the city’s “sphere of influence,” giving the council authority to plan for its development. Anaheim officials have said they would be in favor of bringing the property into the city, and Irvine Co. officials say the process of annexation could be completed by the end of the year.

Council approval of the Irvine Co. plan would put the city further ahead in its attempt to block the county’s jail plan, but Councilman Irv Pickler said he and his colleagues have been looking over their shoulders at the progress of Umberg’s bill.

Though Pickler has some questions about the density of the planned community, which would ultimately provide for three elementary schools, a middle school and a high school, he described the plan as a “good project for Anaheim.”

“Until there are houses up there, the (jail) threat will always be there,” Pickler said. “It hangs over our heads. But the Irvine Co. is in the driver’s seat. We’d just like to see the development of homes out there.”

County planners are also in the final stages of an environmental study of a proposed landfill project on the canyon property.

“I think they (jail proponents) ought to regroup and find some other area for a jail,” the councilman said. “We have all become supporters of this project, and we’re going forward. I don’t see too much opposition developing” at the council level.

Of the pending legislation, Ehrle called the bill “bad government” and an attempt at setting a dangerous precedent.

“There has got to be more than a simple majority to condemn property,” Ehrle said.

Councilman Tom Daly said the city is in “a watchful and concerned mode” on the progress of the Umberg bill.

“We want to have a major say in what is being carried out in the Gypsum Canyon property,” Daly said. “Our preference for the past 20 years has been for a well-planned residential community. The Irvine Co.’s planned communities are some of the best in the world.”