New Jail to Be Erected Near Santa Paula : Corrections: Supervisors approve the 43-acre farmland site despite foes’ claims that the environmental report was falsified.

The Ventura County Board of Supervisors on Thursday approved construction of a new county jail on 43 acres of farmland near Santa Paula, despite opponents’ claims that the board was basing its decision partly on lies in an environmental study.

The supervisors voted 4 to 1, with John K. Flynn dissenting, to quickly build the jail’s $54-million first phase, a decision that apparently secured $31 million in state bond money that could have been lost by delay.

The vote ends a five-year search for the right place to put the county’s second jail--one designed to relieve crowding at the Central Jail in Ventura and to accommodate a projected tripling of inmates by 2010.

If its four phases are built as planned, the jail would eventually have 2,307 beds and cost $191 million.

Although the new jail has been fiercely opposed by dozens of Santa Paula-area residents, most supervisors said that it would be controversial wherever it is built and that its location had been studied long enough.

Maggie Erickson Kildee, whose district includes the jail site, made the motion for approval. She said she would like to endorse Flynn’s plan to expand the present jail at the County Government Center but could not because the expansion would cost far more.

“Nothing would make me happier than to be able to build it here . . . because it wouldn’t be in my district,” Erickson Kildee said, her voice wavering with emotion. “But that would be sheer hypocrisy.”

Essentially, the board vote ratified its 1990 decision to build the new jail near Santa Paula if a final environmental study found no major flaws with the location. Supervisors said the study answered their questions about earthquake and flood hazards as well as cost.

However, the supervisors’ decision came only after they were assured by jail project directors that all assertions in the environmental impact study were true.

In the most dramatic moment of the five-hour hearing, Santa Paula resident Julie Tovias challenged the veracity of the county environmental impact report.

Tovias said she had spoken with three of four state and federal biologists allegedly contacted by county consultants before the consultants concluded that the jail would have little harmful impact on wetlands and wildlife. None of the three recalled conversations with the consultants, Tovias said.

“I don’t know how much more information (in the report) has been falsified,” Tovias told the board.

Questioned by supervisors, county Public Works Director Arthur Goulet, the jail project director, and Beth Becker, a private consultant who oversaw the biological research, assured the board that September, 1991, telephone logs document contacts with three of the four biologists cited in the study.

Reached by The Times, two of the biologists--Cat Brown of the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Morgan Boucke of the state Fish and Game Department--said they recalled no such conversations. A third biologist, Michael Giusti, also of state fish and game, said he remembers only a general, “almost generic” conversation with a county consultant.

Brown and Giusti said they had never been to the jail site, and Boucke said she visited it Tuesday for the first time.

The county report says the value of the natural habitat at the jail site and actions that should be taken to protect it were based in part on the four biologists’ comments.

“I hate that because it’s a direct lie,” Boucke said in an interview. She said she has written a letter of protest to the supervisors.

In an interview, Goulet said the environmental report could be accurate even if the four biologists had never visited the site and had spoken only generally about wetlands and wildlife habitat in the area. He said the county’s two principal biological consultants had visited the jail site several times.

“But we do need to get to the bottom of this,” he said. His staff will check telephone notes of conversations with the four biologists to make sure that representations in the environmental report were justified.

Overall, comments by 27 speakers at Thursday’s hearing were split almost evenly among opponents and supporters of the new jail.

Representatives of business, labor and taxpayer organizations favored the plan.

“Not every individual can be appeased, but this is the correct choice for the county in total,” said Dana Weber Young, president of the Ventura County Economic Development Assn.

Law enforcement agencies and a spokeswoman for county judges also supported the new jail. They said it is needed to respond to increased crime and the threat of court orders to release inmates to relieve jail crowding.

Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury said Ventura County “is desperately in need of this facility (because) the threat of incarceration must be genuine” to be taken seriously by criminals.

Opponents said the new jail would destroy valuable agricultural land and expose jail employees and inmates to the hazards of floods and earthquakes since the site is near a major geological fault and part of it is in a flood plain.

Updated county studies released last week found no serious flooding or geological hazards.

But farmer Roger Orr said he did not trust the studies because the county is both the developer and the decision-maker on the project.

“I think in this case it’s baloney in and baloney out,” he said.

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

Robert Pinkerton, president of the Citizens to Save the Greenbelt, said he will not support a lawsuit to stop the jail but may bring legal action to make sure that all requirements are met.

County Sheriff John V. Gillespie said the jail will probably be 60% full when it opens in mid-1994 and at capacity by 1995.

Times staff writer Sherry Jo contributed to this story.