Plan for Jail Arraignments to Be Revised : Courts: County officials concede that municipal judges were right to point out that the proposal’s potential cost-savings had never been studied.

Breaking a stalemate with local judges, county officials have agreed to revamp a proposal for arraigning criminal suspects in a new courtroom to be built inside the Orange County Jail.

The move revives a plan that had been thrown into doubt earlier this month when municipal judges in the county’s northern district opposed it. The judges said they believed the county was rushing ahead with the idea of using the jail courtroom exclusively for northern district arraignments at its outset, without knowing whether the plan would actually save money.

The judges’ position had angered some county leaders. But after representatives from the two camps met on the issue earlier this week, county officials conceded that the judges may well have been right.

“Everybody kind of looked at each other and said, ‘Geez, maybe I didn’t think deeply enough about this,’ ” said Martin Hairabedian Jr., the presiding judge of the Municipal Court in Fullerton. Hairabedian met Wednesday with county staff members and Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder about breaking the logjam.

County supervisors have already approved $160,000 in funding to remodel a site at the jail to use as the courtroom, and they had hoped to move a judge from the northern district there, perhaps by the end of the year, to arraign misdemeanor suspects. That schedule will not be met, but county officials said Wednesday’s meeting should help to get the proposal back on track.

As a result of the meeting, County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider said his staff will be conducting a 90-day study of the costs and savings of the plan, a review the judges had been seeking. Before approving the funding for the jail courtroom, the county had never undertaken a formal study of the plan’s cost-savings.

The proposal itself may be substantially revised, Schneider said. Rather than using the northern district court in Fullerton exclusively in a pilot arraignment program, the county may instead use the jail courtroom to arraign suspects from all five of its municipal courts--in Fullerton, Newport Beach, Laguna Niguel, Santa Ana and Westminster. Federal prisoners and Immigration and Naturalization Service detainees may be included as well, officials said.

And county officials said they want to consider broadening the program still further by using the proposed jail courtroom for high-security trials and video arraignments, in which the suspect would remain in the jail and the judge would remain in a courtroom off-site.

All these moves taken together may make the plan more cost-effective, officials said.

Some officials have speculated that the county could save several hundred thousand dollars a year in the Fullerton court alone by having suspects in cases there arraigned at the jail. That would not only save the cost of busing them to Fullerton, but would speed the arraignment process and save the county the expense of having to house the prisoners in jail for a night or two.

But the assumptions built into that idea now appear misguided. County officials had thought the jail arraignment plan might mean avoiding transportation from Santa Ana to Fullerton for several busloads of prisoners a day.

But officials say that many of the Fullerton arraignees are coming from sites other than the Orange County Jail, and as few as six misdemeanor suspects a day might be saved the trek.

“It was an error on our part,” Schneider said. “And we take the responsibility for that.” Said another official familiar with the plan: “The suppositions were wrong. Nobody had bothered to pencil it out. And the bottom line is (the judges) were right.”

While Hairabedian said he still considers the project to be “on hold,” he said it could work with “a lot of cooperation” between county officials and the separate judicial branches around the county.

“We’re all looking at the same thing--saving the county money,” he said.

And Cheryl Moore, an aide to Wieder, said the Fullerton judges’ willingness to reconsider the jail plan is a positive step. “It all looks like it’s moving down the right road,” she said.