Supervisors Ready to Bite Bullet, Kill Gypsum Canyon Jail Project : Board: After $7.3 million has been spent, chairman seeks to officially bury the effort next week now that support has vaporized. No alternative is in sight.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Gaddi H. Vasquez proposed Thursday that the county halt its efforts to build a jail in Gypsum Canyon, a move that would kill one of the most ambitious and controversial projects ever considered by the board.

The proposal was put on the board’s agenda for next week, and it already appears to have the needed backing for approval.

“Further expenditures on Gypsum Canyon for the purposes of jail development should cease,” Vasquez said in a letter distributed to each of the other four board members. “I am asking for your support in rescinding the previous board action designating Gypsum Canyon as Orange County’s long-term jail site.”

Vasquez’s suggestion follows on the heels of a letter Monday by Supervisor Thomas F. Riley in which Riley said he could no longer support the project, a 6,720-bed facility long slated for construction in a box canyon about 10 miles east of downtown Anaheim. The chairman’s proposal sets the stage for a landmark meeting next week, when many observers believe the Board of Supervisors will hold its final debate on the Gypsum Canyon jail.

The board designated the canyon as its preferred jail site in 1987, and has since spent $7.3 million toward construction of a facility there. Political and financial problems have always dogged the proposal, however, and now it appears to be on its last legs.

Riley--who supported the Gypsum Canyon plan for years until the tightening county budget and increasingly bleak financial projections for the project convinced him that it was no longer affordable--said Thursday that he would vote with Vasquez to abandon the site. His support ensures that Vasquez and Supervisor Don R. Roth have enough votes to kill the project, and they are likely to be joined by Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder as well.

“It’s very difficult to have spent nearly $7.5 million out there, but I think time has changed things,” Riley said. “That was a rural area when we started this, and the land was supposed to cost $12 million or $14 million. . . . We now know it’s at least $54 million. We just can’t afford to spend that money.”

The proposal offered by Vasquez could also result in the county dropping a lawsuit that it filed in August against the city of Anaheim. That litigation challenged the city’s approval of the Mountain Park housing development, which the Irvine Co. wants to build in the canyon.

The supervisors could stick with the lawsuit, however, as some officials have other objections to the Mountain Park proposal, including its potential effects on traffic and air quality. Vasquez’s proposal does not specifically address the lawsuit or the possibility of the supervisors trying to acquire Gypsum Canyon as a landfill, so those actions could go ahead even if the board approves his motion.

Ending the Gypsum Canyon debate would close that long, expensive effort, but it will by no means mark the end of the search for ways to add more local jail beds. The county’s five jails are badly overcrowded, with 4,400 prisoners housed in facilities that are meant to hold 3,203.

Another 850 prisoners are being released prematurely every week to free up room in the jails for more serious offenders, and local judges are so infuriated by some of those releases that they have charged Sheriff Brad Gates with contempt of court and threatened to send him to jail.

Many police officers, judges and others agree that the early releases have encouraged criminals to view the county justice system with increasingly dangerous contempt. Many suspects are released and return home within hours of their arrest because the jails do not have room to hold them.

The Gypsum Canyon jail was meant to solve those problems by giving the county a massive new facility that would keep inmates behind bars rather than releasing them early. And if the board gives up on that project Tuesday, it will still have the issue of overcrowding to deal with.

“I am committed to seeing this process move ahead, and to work with each of you in solving the jail overcrowding problem,” Vasquez wrote. “Together, this board can work to build a consensus and to incrementally develop new alternatives to help alleviate the current overcrowding situation.”

The first step in evaluating those ideas will come from a task force of officials working with the county administrative office. That group will report back to the supervisors in December with an update on ways to alleviate overcrowding.

New jail expansion proposals are expected to focus on county-owned property, which includes sites in Orange, Santa Ana and Anaheim, as well as one in an unincorporated area near Irvine.