Deputies Soon to Be Off Rat Patrol : Law enforcement: Sheriff’s Department negotiating for new facility to replace infested South County substation.

Marcia Llamas keeps a small baseball bat under her desk at the sheriff’s substation here, where she works as an investigative aide.

She doesn’t use it to defend herself against criminals.

She keeps it there to defend herself against the rats.

“They’re everywhere,” said Llamas, who has worked at the substation off Crown Valley Parkway for nine years.

Capt. Tim Simon, who heads the South County substation, said deputies have been virtually forced to flee.

“We get driven out of this building probably twice a month this time of year because rats die and then rot and then stink us out of the place,” said Simon. “The vector control has been out here. We have had the health department out here. Everyone has put in writing that this is probably the worst infestation they have ever seen.”

For 17 years, deputies and staff at the substation have been plagued with these “Jurassic rats”--as Simon calls them--as well as leaky ceilings, overflowing toilets and quarters so cramped that suspects are held in the lunchroom.

But finally, the Sheriff’s Department expects to bid an unaffectionate farewell to the broken-down trailers that since 1978 have served as sheriff’s headquarters for South County.

The department has announced that it is negotiating to acquire a new facility in Aliso Viejo at 11 Journey, about three miles from the current substation.

The facility, which includes a 27,200-square-foot building and a 250-car parking lot, will be bought with Mello-Roos funds that have been set aside over the past eight years specifically for the substation, Simon said.

The department is negotiating the $3.4-million purchase from Windrose Pacific Associates and the Mission Viejo Co., the developer of unincorporated Aliso Viejo, according to the county.

The substation will serve a region that encompasses about 300 square miles and a population of 450,000.

If everything goes without a hitch, employees will move out of the trailers by November.

And it’s not a moment too soon for the people who have long endured the creepy pitter-patter of tiny feet and the other not-so-quaint characteristics of their substation.

“How can you take pride of ownership in a dilapidated series of buildings? It’s embarrassing to have the public come here,” Simon said.

About 300 deputies and staffers work out of a facility that originally was designed to house 150 employees. Quarters are so cramped that the lunchroom is used as a detaining room, waiting room and copy room, all at the same time.

“Sometimes we have to eat lunch with the inmates,” said Jeannie Ebargaray, who has worked as an office assistant at the substation for 13 years. “We have no choice. There are no holding facilities, no rooms to lock them up in.”

Lockers are also a rare commodity at the South County headquarters. About 80 deputies must use their own cars to store their equipment, and they often change uniforms in the parking lot. The other deputies share lockers inside the trailers.

And when it rains, it pours inside the substation.

The ceiling above the women’s bathroom is so leaky that a spare umbrella is always kept near the toilet.

“When it rains, you have to hold an umbrella over you while you’re going to the bathroom,” Ebargaray said, laughing.

It is the employees’ sense of humor that has kept up their morale during the years of rat infestations and leaking roofs.

“The sad commentary is we’ve lived with it here so long that people have to utilize humor to get through the day,” Simon said.

The captain himself is a practitioner of such humor. In place of the usual plaques and awards that decorate some police captains’ offices, rat memorabilia lines the shelves of Simon’s bookcase.

On the second shelf is displayed a “mug shot” of an employee dressed in a rat costume. And on the top shelf, next to a huge rubber rat, sit two industrial-size rat traps, shiny and unused.

“The rats that we have around here could carry those off,” Simon said, adding that rat traps have proved ineffective in controlling the rodent population around the substation.

So have rat poison and rodent-hunting cats.

“There’s nothing that we can do to overcome the infestation,” he said.

In the meantime, employees look forward to the day when they don’t have rats for office mates.

“The Sheriff’s Department has been working real hard on the negotiations, because they have more than outgrown their facility,” said Wendy Wetzel Harder, vice president of marketing at the Mission Viejo Co. “And we’re working hard to make it happen too.”