County on Schedule for an Early ’93 Opening of East Mesa Jail

Even with a whopping budget deficit, San Diego County is sticking to plans for an early 1993 opening of the maximum-security jail that has been built, but has been standing vacant for months on East Mesa, a county lawyer assured a judge Wednesday.

Despite a looming county budget deficit--projected late Wednesday at $44.4 million this fiscal year--officials remain committed to opening the 1,500-bed facility as soon as possible, Deputy County Counsel Nathan Northup told El Cajon Superior Court Judge James Malkus. An innovative deal that sidesteps the budget keeps bringing in cash for the jail, Northup said.

“We’re still on track, despite budget woes increasing by the moment,” Northup said in the latest in a regular series of hearings on the county’s chronically crowded jails. “No one anticipates that there will be any delay in getting East Mesa open as soon as possible.” Jail officials added later that a February or March opening is possible.

The maximum-security East Mesa facility, 7 miles east of Interstate 805 near the U.S.-Mexico border, has been viewed for years as the cure for the county’s crowded jails. Though the county’s eight jails were filled Wednesday with about 4,300 inmates, only one of the facilities was actually over capacity, according to county figures.

Surveys consistently rank the county’s jails among the nation’s most jammed. The American Civil Liberties Union says the crowding leads to violence and inhumane conditions.

Over the past decade, in response to suits filed by the ACLU, judges have brought the downtown San Diego jail and five outlying jails--men’s facilities in Vista, El Cajon, South Bay and Descanso and the women’s Las Colinas jail in Santee--under court-ordered caps.

Two newer jails, the Las Colinas men’s facility and a 512-bed medium-security facility also at East Mesa, have not been brought before the court. Nor has the maximum-security East Mesa jail, which has been standing empty for months because there has been no money in the county budget to pay the 212 guards the facility demands.

To get around the budget, the county struck a deal last year with the federal government to house inmates from the Metropolitan Correctional Center--the downtown San Diego federal jail that’s also crowded--at the county jail four blocks away.

It is only because of that contract, a separate funding source projected to provide $2.7 million this year, that the county is still planning to open East Mesa’s maximum-security wings, lawyer Northup told the judge Wednesday.

“It’s still our priority,” Northup said after the hearing, adding that the first group of new guards is working through its training program.

“The story here is that the county is trying to find a way to solve its own problems, by being creative in terms of trying to come up with the cash,” said Jim Painter, director of detention for the Sheriff’s Department, which runs the jails. “But that’s what we have to do these days.”

A potentially troublesome glitch, officials said Wednesday, is that the number of federal inmates in county custody has dwindled the past couple of weeks, probably because the federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30.

Only 43 federal inmates--at $67 per inmate per night--spent Tuesday night at the downtown county jail, the Sheriff’s Department said. In July, that figure averaged about 130.

Sheriff’s officials said they hoped the figure would climb back over 100 after Oct. 1, with the beginning of the new federal fiscal year.

Jailers told Malkus Wednesday that only the Las Colinas men’s facility, which technically is not part of the ACLU lawsuits, is over capacity. It held 603 inmates, three over its limit of 600, the Sheriff’s Department said.

All other jails were at least a dozen inmates under limits. “I’m satisfied at this point with what is going on,” Malkus said.

The judge set the next monitoring session for Dec. 1.