Battle Lines Drawn in Orange Jail Expansion : Supervisors: County board approves plan to enlarge Theo Lacy branch. Host city vows to sue.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors, setting up the prospect of a bruising legal battle, on Tuesday approved a controversial plan that could ultimately add about 900 beds to the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange.

Orange city officials, incensed over the proposed expansion, said they plan to file suit in coming days to try to block the multimillion-dollar project even before it begins.

“Having a jail in the area is certainly a stigma,” said Brent Hunter, director of the Orange Chamber of Commerce. “The larger, the more visible, the more impact it has, the more stigma there is.”

The expansion plan passed by a vote of 4-1, with Supervisor Don R. Roth offering a bitter dissent and admonishing his colleagues for reneging on a 1990 agreement that capped the number of jail inmates at 1,326.

Tuesday’s plan may shatter that cap. Pending environmental reviews, the inmate population could soar to more than 2,200 by double-bunking some cells and building two new barracks at The City Drive facility.

If all 902 jail beds are added in coming years as hoped, that would mean one-time capital costs of at least $9.6 million, plus annual operating costs of more than $10.5 million, county analysts estimate. With county funds already strained, no one is certain where that money would come from.

The Theo Lacy expansion offers a stopgap solution to the array of jail crowding problems now confronting the county. But officials acknowledge that it brings them no closer in their frustrating, decade-long search to find a new jail site to meet the county’s long-term law enforcement needs.

Hopes of solving the problem were dealt two serious setbacks last year when voters rejected a half-cent sales tax for jail construction, and the Board of Supervisors later abandoned a four-year, $7-million attempt to put a jail in Gypsum Canyon because of financial and legislative obstacles.

The county is now giving early releases to more than 800 inmates each week because of crowding. And even under the plan approved Tuesday, the county expects to have 1,820 inmates above capacity within three years.

The situation has gotten so bad, Sheriff Brad Gates acknowledged to the board Tuesday, that he has started allowing more serious offenders into Theo Lacy and the James A. Musick Branch Jail, a working farm in Lake Forest.

In an interview last week, the double-bunking plan and other aspects of the Theo Lacy expansion drew sharp criticism from Gates. Although he defended his criticisms in a letter to supervisors last week, he remained largely silent about those issues in addressing the board Tuesday. But he did speak at length about the risk-classification problem that has intensified in recent weeks.

Until Nov. 6, the Musick jail was used almost exclusively for drunk drivers, traffic violators and other low-risk offenders, while Theo Lacy housed primarily drug offenders and other low- to medium-security risks.

But Gates said crowding forced him to go back on his pledges to local residents and to “reclassify” the security risk system in Orange and Lake Forest to allow housing of more serious offenders--inmates who otherwise would have been placed at the Central Jail in Santa Ana.

Gates said he has concerns over whether the facilities and staffing at branch jails can handle the increased risk, but said he had “no choice.”

Local residents around the two sites fear the effects of bringing more serious offenders to their neighborhoods--particularly in Orange, where the jail sits just 100 feet from the Orangewood Children’s Home.

Susan Trager, an Irvine attorney representing Orange, maintained that the new classifications mean “murderers, child molesters and rape-with-a-foreign object types of folk brought in the jail. These aren’t nice people.”

At Tuesday’s board meeting, Orange city officials, activists and business leaders also maintained that an expanded jail--just across the street from The City Shopping Center--will hurt chances of further commercial development.

The common theme running through the protests was the question of “integrity” as one speaker after another challenged the county to live up to its 1990 agreement with the city and restore its credibility.

In the spring of 1990, after several years of debate over the county’s plans to add about 600 beds at Theo Lacy, Orange and county officials agreed to a plan capping the inmate population at 1,326. In exchange, the city quickly dropped an environmental lawsuit that had stalled the project.

But last week, county officials stunned city of Orange officials by saying that they believed the 1990 agreement was never binding because the owner of The City Shopping Center had not signed it, as required.

That position has infuriated Supervisor Roth, whose district includes Orange and who played a key role in securing the 1990 agreement.

“I gave my word. I gave my word,” Roth told his fellow supervisors. “If we lose our integrity, how can we provide the needed leadership in these troubled economic times?”

Roth also warned that without a clear-cut funding source identified, the Theo Lacy expansion could become “another ghost jail scheme.” And he said: “Enough is enough. . . . We need to come to our senses.”

Roth’s protestations won him allies from a half-dozen Orange speakers who addressed the board, but not from his fellow supervisors.

“I see a lot of Brutuses around here,” said Bob Bennyhoff, an activist and publisher of a small newspaper in Orange. “We made a mistake in trusting (the county). . . . What happened to the agreement we thought we had?”

County supervisors never directly answered that oft-asked question, but rather pointed to the urgency of finding a short-term solution to the jail crowding problem.

“As painful as it is to all of us,” Board Chairman Roger R. Stanton said, the county must begin to address the jail problem somehow in the face of court orders and litigation on the crowding and inmate-release issues.

“We don’t have many options,” Stanton said. “We’re down to a real tight squeeze as far as what we can select from.”

But even as they moved ahead with environmental reviews for the Theo Lacy expansion, supervisors demonstrated limits in just how far they are willing to go the solve the jail problem.

As part of its jail recommendations, county staff had proposed that the county push for legislation in Sacramento to gain more flexibility in securing early releases for prisoners, and also seek a state exemption from certain environmental review procedures for future jail projects.

County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider explained that the state had managed to exempt itself from environmental regulations in building a prison and that the county, through its lobbyists, might be able to do the same thing.

County’s New Jail Plan

By the time construction is finished later this year, the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange is expected to house up to 1,326 inmates. That figure could grow sharply under a plan approved Tuesday by the County Board of Supervisors. Here are the highlights of the plan:

Add 358 beds to Theo Lacy by double-bunking, with a one-time cost of about $487,000 and annual operating costs of up to $4.5 million.

Begin environmental reviews on the prospect of adding two more barracks and another 544 beds at Theo Lacy. This would bring the maximum jail population there to 2,228 inmates. It would require at least $9.1 million in construction costs and up to $6 million in annual operations costs.

Expand existing programs for electronic home confinement and community work furloughs by up to 300 slots each year.

Source: County Criminal Justice Committee on Jail Planning