Block Gets Ready for the Worst : Budget: The sheriff plans to close four jail facilities, lay off up to 1,700 deputies in cost-cutting moves. About 5,000 inmates--but not felons--will be released.

Sheriff Sherman Block has decided to close four jail facilities and release 5,000 of the county’s 21,000 inmates in a budget-cutting effort that will begin May 3, Undersheriff Jerry Harper said Wednesday.

Preparing for a “worst-case scenario” of a $152-million budget cut in the fiscal year starting July 1, Block also plans to begin notifying deputies of layoffs--the first such notices in the department’s history, said Harper, Block’s chief deputy. The projected cuts are in addition to an $83.8-million reduction ordered in the department’s current budget.

Only inmates sentenced for misdemeanors, not felons, will be released, Harper said. But he noted that this would include most jailed drunk drivers as well as gang members and others found guilty of carrying concealed weapons. If such people are released, there will be little deterrent to others committing similar offenses, he said. According to present plans, Harper said the layoffs will affect 1,600 to 1,700 of the department’s 7,300 deputies, with those hired last laid off first. The notices are scheduled to be sent out June 1 with the first layoffs coming one month later and continuing at about 500 a week, he said.

Another 300 to 400 layoffs are planned among clerical and other personnel who are not sworn law officers.

Block outlined the moves and other possibilities for cost-cutting in a letter to members of the Board of Supervisors, which has final say over the department’s budget. Harper said he would not discuss the other alternatives until the letter is received, no later than today.

Harper said the jails that will be closed are Mira Loma in the Antelope Valley, the Biscailuz Center in East Los Angeles and two of several facilities at the Peter J. Pitchess Honor Rancho in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Other steps already suggested by Block include an 8.25% across-the-board reduction in the salaries of Sheriff’s Department employees and the closure of up to nine of the 20 sheriff’s stations across the county.

Last year, critics accused the sheriff of playing a game of political bluff with the budget, threatening cuts in gang control units and his search-and-rescue unit. Those threats were partially rescinded when the supervisors spared his department some of the projected budget cuts.

But on Wednesday, Block’s chief spokesman, Capt. Douglas McClure, sharply denied that Block’s plans were part of a political maneuver.

“It’s not something Sherman Block is doing to make a point,” McClure said in an interview. “We’re out of alternatives, we really are.”

McClure, however, noted that the Legislature could still decide to spread the state’s deficit over two to five years, freeing up more money for the counties and indirectly for sheriff’s departments across the state.

The best-case scenario, he said, might entail $58 million in budget cuts, still requiring a salary cut, but avoiding most if not all layoffs.

Harper noted that as a result of past budget cuts, the Sheriff’s Department has eliminated 540 positions this year through attrition. Some layoffs were barely avoided in the last year, he said.

Harper and McClure made their comments the day after the failure of a ballot measure that would have raised property taxes in Los Angeles to pay for an additional 1,000 LAPD officers. It fell short of the two-thirds vote required for passage.

They said the public’s unwillingness to support higher taxes for law enforcement creates an atmosphere in which it is important that the Sheriff’s Department take steps early enough, before budget deliberations on the part of state and county officials are complete, to avoid deeper cuts in services later on, when fewer months remain in the next fiscal year.