County May Lose State Funds if Jail Is Not Built : Santa Paula: An official warns that the Board of Corrections may not grant another extension on $10 million earmarked for the work.

A state official sternly warned the Ventura County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday that unless it moves quickly to build a new jail near Santa Paula, the county will lose $10 million in state funding.

The state Department of Corrections has granted the county three six-month extensions to use $10 million toward construction of a new county jail.

A fourth extension has been requested, but Board of Corrections official Karen L. Rosa said she doubts that the board would grant the extension if the county is still undecided about where to put the new jail.

“While the Board of Corrections tries to avoid local decision issues, I would be remiss if I did not advise you that it would be difficult to support further extensions if the justification was due to the fact that the county was considering a different site or reassessing whether a new jail is needed,” Rosa told the supervisors.

Rosa’s remarks were part of a state-of-the-jails presentation by Sheriff John V. Gillespie, a strong supporter of the Santa Paula site. Gillespie offered a grim picture of how the County Jail’s severe crowding is affecting the inmate population and the dangers facing the county if the problem is not addressed immediately.

The presentation also included a report by former ACLU lawyer John Hagar, who specializes in jail crowding litigation.

Hagar said the county is ripe for a costly class-action lawsuit because the jail is housing more than twice as many inmates than its designed capacity of 501 beds. If such a suit were to succeed, he said, the county could lose control of the jail system to a court-appointed trustee.

Since the Board of Supervisors tentatively approved the Santa Paula jail site in 1990, the county has spent close to $10 million to buy the land, design a building and study its impact.

But at a public hearing last month, several Santa Paula residents called the jail’s proposed location in a flood plain near the Santa Clara River a disaster waiting to happen and urged supervisors to look elsewhere for an appropriate site.

The board then unexpectedly voted to re-examine a proposal by Supervisor John K. Flynn to expand the jail at the County Government Center as an alternative to building a new facility.

Flynn’s proposal had been dismissed during the site selection process as more expensive per square foot than building at Santa Paula and too limited to accommodate the large increase in population expected over the next two decades.

The board is scheduled to meet March 13 to decide whether to certify the environmental report on the Santa Paula jail. If that study is approved, construction could begin immediately.

Flynn said Tuesday that he will take advantage of that hearing to make a final pitch for his plan.

The Board of Corrections meets the following day to evaluate the supervisors’ request for an extension on the jail funding, which will be needed even if the environmental report is approved.

The state has set aside almost $30 million for the new county jail from three separate voter-approved bond issues. Of that total, only $10 million is tied to a deadline extension by the Board of Corrections. The rest is secure until at least 1993, Rosa said.

On Tuesday, Gillespie and his guest speakers tried to convince the board that any further delays in building the Santa Paula jail would have disastrous consequences.

Not only is the jail becoming more crowded, Gillespie said, but the inmates are more dangerous because law enforcement officials are forced to release less-dangerous detainees.

“These factors make our facilities more dangerous and expose us to the ever-present risk of court intervention in the operation of our jails,” he said.

Assistant Sheriff Richard S. Bryce noted that the lowest-risk inmate category, pretrial misdemeanants, make up only 7% of the total jail population, compared with 16% in 1988. And pretrial misdemeanants who go to jail average eight prior arrests, he said.

Meanwhile, the percentage of inmates classified as violent/assaultive has risen by 34%, Bryce said, and the out-of-county inmate population has risen by 60%--an indicator that crime problems in Los Angeles County are spilling across the county border.

At the same time, statistics show that crime has increased in nine of the county’s 10 cities this year, Bryce said.

Undersheriff Larry Carpenter said that despite a dramatic rise in crime over the past decade, only 179 beds have been added to the county’s jail system. In 1991, despite heavy reliance on diversion programs, the inmate population exceeded the system’s designed capacity by more than 600 beds, Carpenter said.

As a result, Gillespie added, storage rooms, leisure rooms and even chapels have been converted into dormitories.