Jail Crisis Toll Includes Cities’ Peace of Mind : Overcrowding: Shortage of county cells prompts committee’s push for combined efforts toward more local facilities.

Garden Grove Police Chief Stanley L. Knee knows all too well what Orange County’s jail overcrowding crisis has cost his city.

Lacking a jail of its own, Garden Grove has spent more than $450,000 in the last 18 months to house its most serious offenders at county lockups.

During that same time, officers were forced to release 3,900 criminal suspects back to the streets because either county booking fees had grown too expensive or there was simply no place to put them in the county jails.

“What is amazing is that we are releasing 75% of our misdemeanor suspects for things like concealed weapons or assault and battery,” Knee said Thursday. “We’re not the only city doing it, but I live in this city and it worries me. It worries me that we now make decisions based on economics, rather than what’s best for the public safety of our citizens.”

This erosion of peace of mind in cities like Garden Grove is what prompted a “super-committee” of local municipal officials to recommend earlier this week that cities begin a major push to build or expand jail facilities for prisoners who can no longer be accommodated in the county system.

“If we don’t band together and dig our heels in, some of us will go under,” Keith Nelson, a former La Palma councilman who chaired the League of California Cities’ eight-month study of available jail space, said at a news conference. “We are hoping that there is power in numbers.”

Nelson admitted Thursday that the committee’s report was not intended to solve the county’s decade-old problem. Rather, it was an attempt to nudge back to the spotlight an issue that, left untended, promises to slide further out of control.

Not in two years, since the 1991 election in which voters rejected a proposed half-cent sales tax for future jail construction and operation, has the issue received the public attention it warrants, Nelson said.

“Right now, things are . . . not acceptable,” said Scott Diehl, San Clemente councilman and president of the Orange County League of Cities. “People are getting out earlier and earlier, and some are not even going to jail.”

According to the committee’s findings, it is estimated that in two years the county’s five-facility jail system will be 1,820 prisoners over capacity. By the year 2006, that number is expected to reach 5,295.

Although the study did not specifically recommend how many jail cells cities should include in their future plans, it urged municipal leaders to begin now to explore future funding sources or possible partnerships with private companies.

Potential funding sources outlined in the study include the creation of new taxing districts that could finance the construction and operation of jail facilities throughout the county. Establishing such fees would require an approving vote by residents or businesses within those districts.

The study also recommended pursuit of federal and state criminal justice grants.

Even though voters overwhelmingly rejected the sales-tax increase two years ago, league officials hoped that the great need for jails could help muster enough political will to make tax districts a serious option.

“For sheer survival,” Nelson said, “cities have to begin looking at this as a ‘we’ thing, not ‘us against them.’ ”

For more than half of the county’s 31 cities, the league report would require providing new jail services that were never part of cities’ long-term planning. And with an estimated $44 million in local property tax revenue going this year to plug the state’s budget shortfall, the jail demands could not come at a worse time.

“I know cities are worried about how they are going to get money to do this,” Nelson said. “But this problem is not going to fade from view.”

In Garden Grove, where jail capacity is all of two holding cells, Councilman Mark Leyes said the city is reconsidering a plan for a joint public-private jail enterprise.

The councilman estimated that the city could build its own 20- to 25-bed jail facility for about $1.6 million and operate it for about $275,000 per year.

Placing a jail in the community is “a dangerous political issue, but somebody’s got to do it,” Leyes said.

Last year, the city was studying two sites, one on Euclid Street and another on Westminster Avenue.