County Poised to Approve Jail Near Santa Paula

Their questions about earthquakes, floods and costs apparently answered, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors is poised to approve construction of a new jail on farmland near Santa Paula.

Despite complaints that flaws remain in an environmental study of the project, most supervisors said Wednesday that they would be surprised if new issues are raised at today’s hearing that could block construction.

“There is an anticipation of a 4-to-1 vote,” Supervisor Vicky Howard said. And according to Supervisor John K. Flynn, the board’s lone opponent of the new jail, “I have absolutely no doubt at all that it will pass.”

Even Santa Paula area residents, who are the project’s main opponents, seem resigned to the board’s approval. Robert Pinkerton, president of Citizens to Save the Greenbelt, said, “It’s a done deal.”

Nor does Pinkerton think that his loosely knitted organization, which hired a lawyer to challenge the project, is likely to file a lawsuit to block construction.

Board approval would end a five-year search for the right place to put the county’s second jail--one designed to relieve overcrowding at the County Jail in Ventura and to accommodate a projected tripling of inmates by the year 2010.

Supervisors face a May deadline imposed by the state Board of Corrections to certify the environmental study of the new jail and a September deadline to hire a building contractor.

The state is providing $31 million of the $54-million cost of the jail’s first phase and has grown impatient with construction delays by Ventura County. About $10.7 million of the promised state money would be lost if no decision is made by May 21.

Even with state money for construction, finances may be the most prickly unresolved jail issue because the jail’s first phase will require 176 employees and cost $12.2 million a year to operate fully.

Supervisors have said that they are not interested in new sales or utility taxes to pay for jail operations, two options listed by analysts, and that most of the jail’s operations budget probably will have to come from existing county programs.

The board first approved construction of the 752-bed first phase in 1990 after reviewing a preliminary environmental study that found few problems with the 157-acre Santa Paula site.

But a second, more detailed study--the one now under consideration--was required before construction could begin. And after a stormy Jan. 8 hearing, where speakers said the county had not sufficiently studied the risk of floods and earthquakes, supervisors asked for more definitive information.

In reports released last week, county officials said additional research had only supported their original findings. A Santa Paula jail would pose no hazard to inmates although it is near a major earthquake fault, and the jail site would be inundated in a 100-year flood, they said.

County analysts also concluded that a second option that the board ordered restudied--expanding the existing jail at the County Government Center--would cost much more than the Santa Paula jail.

Yet, critics of the new jail say the county has not met the requirements of state environmental law and its own planning guidelines with its jail studies.

Marc Chytilo, chief counsel for the Environmental Defense Center in Santa Barbara, said the county’s environmental study has been improved since January but remains flawed.

Chytilo, who was hired by Citizens to Save the Greenbelt, said the county has failed to locate the nearby Oak Ridge Fault as it promised, has not provided an adequate buffer area for the Todd Barranca wetlands and has not taken seriously enough the threat of flooding.

The county based its assumptions that floods pose no danger to people on engineers’ computer models that may not turn out to be correct, Chytilo said.

Although floors at the new jail are designed to be one foot above 100-year flood levels, Chytilo said the county is gambling when it puts a jail at the edge of the Santa Clara River and next to the Todd Barranca.

“As they sit in that jail with the floodwater rising, all the comfort inmates will have is that they could stack up all those studies and computer models and stand on them and be a few inches higher,” Chytilo said.

Chytilo said the county has still done too little trenching to try to locate the Oak Ridge Fault, but he acknowledged that the work “probably represents a good-faith effort at trying to determine what the risk is.”

Chytilo’s firm was one of four dozen organizations or individuals that opposed the county’s draft environmental study in January. Critics of the study--and the project--included the Sierra Club, the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County and the city of Santa Paula.

Today’s hearing is scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. at the supervisors’ chambers in Ventura.