Courthouse Plan Is Case of Arrested Development : Construction: Supervisors shelve sites in Santa Monica and West L.A., but work will proceed on facility near LAX.

Los Angeles County Supervisors have dropped the gavel on plans to build new courthouses in Santa Monica and West Los Angeles.

The proposed structures will be put on indefinite hold. But in a mixed verdict that offered some hope of relief from chronic courtroom crowding on the Westside, the supervisors decided to go ahead with construction of a new courthouse near Los Angeles International Airport.

The new building at 111th Street and Aviation Boulevard in Westchester, which has already cost the county $23.2 million in preliminary development costs, is expected to serve an area stretching south of the Santa Monica Freeway.

The building, expected to be completed in 1996, would relieve pressure on existing courts in Santa Monica and West Los Los Angeles while serving the South Bay.

The Board of Supervisors’ 4-1 decision Tuesday also promised funds to add a new hearing room to the courthouse in Malibu, which would allow for the transfer of a Superior Court judge from Santa Monica.

“That will make more space here and we can really use it,” said David Rothman, supervising judge of the Santa Monica courts, where unused jury rooms have been pressed into service as jurists’ chambers as the caseload mounts.

Probation offices will also be moved into leased quarters elsewhere, freeing up more space at the Civic Center facility.

“Although we’re not getting a courthouse, we’re getting a lot of help here,” Rothman said. “We have to male some major renovations he to make it possible to survive the next 10 years.”

The fate of Westside courthouses was decided as part of a decision to indefinitely postpone six proposed projects on which the county has already spent $16 million. Aside from Santa Monica and West Los Angeles, the others are in Lancaster, North Hollywood, Pasadena and Torrance.

The county would have faced deficits of up to $312 million over a nine-year period if it had continued with plans to build all the courthouses envisioned in a plan dating to the early 1980s, county Chief Administrative Officer Sally R. Reed told the board.

Seven new and replacement structures have been built in that period, she said, resulting in an increase of more than 100 courtrooms.

But projected costs have gone up dramatically, and court-imposed penalty fees that were supposed to fund the new courthouses have been difficult to collect because they have proved unaffordable to many.

Courthouse construction money comes from two different funds that tap general court fines, court-imposed traffic school fees and parking citations.

After rising through the late 1980s, the annual revenue for courthouse construction and related costs has dropped steadily from $46.4 million in 1989-90 to $35.3 million in the last fiscal year.

At Tuesday’s meeting, only the Westchester project and another in Chatsworth were approved, largely because so much money has been spent on them so far.

Plans call for there to be no expansion in staff to run the new facilities.

“It was hoped that construction of a new courthouse here would relieve the problem,” said Ray Hart, supervising judge at West Los Angeles Municipal Court.

“But we’re going to have to deal with what we have and hope that construction of the courthouse at the airport will proceed with all due diligence,” he said.

Times staff writer Tracy Kaplan contributed to this report.