Senate Panel Halves Funds for Courthouse

A Senate appropriations panel on Tuesday slashed in half President Clinton’s budget request for $168 million to begin construction of the proposed federal courthouse in downtown Santa Ana.

Meeting in closed session, the appropriations subcommittee that funds the Treasury, Postal Service and general government operations voted to set aside only $84 million for the Santa Ana courthouse in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

If it stands, “that reduction makes construction well nigh impossible,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), who has pushed for a new Orange County courthouse along with Rep. Robert K. Dornan (R-Garden Grove).

Cox, however, said full funding for the project could still be restored as the appropriations legislation makes its way through Congress. “We have three opportunities to fix this,” the congressman said. Dornan was not immediately available for comment.

A spokesman for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who sits on the full appropriations committee, said that the freshman California Democrat won a commitment late Tuesday night from Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.), who chairs the appropriations subcommittee, that the project will receive full funding in 1995.

“It’s an incredible indication that the courthouse will get full funding,” said spokesman Bill Chandler. Chandler said Feinstein wrote a July 14 letter to DeConcini urging him to set aside the full $168 million requested in the Clinton budget.

The courthouse would be built on a 3.9-acre parcel of city-owned land in the Santa Ana Civic Center, on a site bounded by 4th, 5th and Ross streets. City officials expect that a new, 348,000-square-foot federal courthouse and office complex would create a wellspring of economic activity in the struggling downtown area.

The legislation that contains the courthouse money must still be considered by the full Senate Appropriations Committee, the full Senate and a House-Senate conference committee. It must then win final approval from both branches of Congress.

The House voted June 22 to appropriate $151 million for the Santa Ana project, after making a 10% across-the-board cut in all courthouse funding requests.

If courthouse funding is significantly reduced, “it would have the potential to do one of several things,” said Robin Graf, an official of the General Services Administration, the federal housekeeping agency that would supervise courthouse construction.

Cutting the appropriation “could either reduce the size of the project, in which case the design would have to be revised, or we might have to wait another year for (full) construction funding,” Graf said.

But Cox said that proceeding on the assumption that more funding could come next year would be dangerous. “It might very well be irresponsible for architects and designers and engineers to proceed under the assumption that the amount of money they’re going to have to work with is double what Congress appropriated,” Cox said.

Orange County has no permanent federal courthouse, although a handful of judges sit in temporary, 30,000-square-foot quarters in the Civic Center. Cox, Dornan and other local lawmakers have argued that the Los Angeles courthouse, where many Orange County cases are referred, is choked with litigation and too far away.

With a population of 2.4 million, Orange County deserves its own federal bench, the congressmen say.

Congress appropriated design funds last year, and a design contract was awarded in March, according to Graf.