Crunch Time in Long Search for O.C. Jail Site

Sheriff Mike Carona and a group of top county leaders are spending the next few weeks trying to do what many consider impossible: find an acceptable site for a new jail somewhere in Orange County.

Over the last 30 years, the county has spent millions of dollars in failed efforts to do exactly that. Downtown Santa Ana? Too close to homes. El Toro? Land being used for a new airport. Anaheim Hills? Rejected by county supervisors.

Meanwhile, county jails operate under ever-worsening conditions. Last year, federal figures indicated that Orange County’s jails are the most overcrowded of any major urban area in the country.

The space crunch at the jails--which need 5,100 new beds within a decade--is so severe that thousands of inmates every year are released before their sentences are up.

Unraveling the problem will require finding the perfect jail site that has eluded the county for decades, then breaking a political stalemate that has killed all previous attempts.

Sources say officials have pinpointed nine potential sites along a rump of sparsely populated land running from Irvine Lake down the base of the Santa Ana Mountains into South County. An announcement on a handful of final sites may come within a month.

“If you take a look, behind Irvine and Lake Forest, away from San Juan Capistrano, there is a lot of rugged, undeveloped terrain,” said Irvine Councilman Greg Smith, who is among the local leaders searching for a site.

“That general area is the area where we are looking at,” he added. “We are looking at keeping [the sites] away from the urban developed areas of Anaheim Hills and Irvine and Lake Forest.”

What to do about jail overcrowding is emerging as a defining test for Carona, the county’s first new sheriff in more than two decades. In an interview this week, Carona went so far as to say he will not seek reelection if he fails to break the jail logjam.

“It’s a tough problem to solve, but it’s not unsolvable,” he said.

Every Option Presents Problem to New Sheriff

But others remain skeptical. Some question whether a remote site makes sense given the heavy costs of buying land and then, once finished, transporting inmates to and from court. If the only sites acceptable are located deep inside pristine canyon country and parkland, they are likely to draw fire from environmentalists.

“It’s a huge political problem for this sheriff, probably the biggest one he’ll face,” said Mark Baldassare, professor of urban regional planning at UC Irvine.

For Carona’s predecessor, longtime Sheriff Brad Gates, the solution lay in a massive expansion of the James A. Musick Branch Jail in Irvine. The jail now houses about 1,100 low-security inmates, but Gates wanted to build one of the nation’s largest maximum-security jails there, capable of serving as many as 7,500 inmates.

For Carona, pushing ahead with those plans would alienate many of the South County voters who live nearby and strongly backed his candidacy. At the same time, he made solving the jail crisis a top priority during the campaign.

“No matter how [Carona] approaches this, he’s in a corner,” said George P. Wright, chairman of Santa Ana College’s criminal justice department. “It’s easy to stand outside [as a challenger] and be critical. But once you’ve got the job, you’re going to have to deliver, and it’s going to be very difficult to deliver on that one.”

Carona hasn’t rejected the Musick expansion outright but says he’s optimistic that an alternative site can be found. He’s already chipped away at the Musick expansion plans, lowering the projection of extra beds he needs by about 20%. In addition, Carona has reduced the amount of space he needs to house them--from 100 acres to between 25 and 40.

Adding urgency to the search is an initiative now brewing in South County. The Safe and Healthy Communities proposal, which proponents hope to put on the county ballot, takes aim at well-advanced plans to build a commercial airport at El Toro but also would require a two-thirds vote for future jail expansion plans of more than 1,000 beds within a half-mile of homes.

That, says Carona, could dash attempts to find an alternative site. If the initiative looks likely to pass, he says, he would be left with no option but to press ahead with expanding Musick, which would not require a special election.

Meanwhile, he has joined with officials in Irvine and Lake Forest to scour the landscape. The ideal site for a new jail would include enough flat land to build on, have good road access, be at least half a mile from homes and have an owner willing to sell at a price the county could afford.

A Tough Sell to Environmentalists

The area must also pass muster with environmentalists, which could be a tough task.

“I would see difficulty in placing facilities in areas that are of pristine natural land because there’s so little left,” said Dan Silver of the Endangered Habitats League.

Finding a suitable site in the hilly terrain will prove difficult, according to Sherry Meddick, a community activist in Silverado Canyon. “It’s hard enough to put a house out here because the land is so forbidding,” she said. “It’s billy goat country.”

Local officials who are conducting the hunt disagree. They are keeping tight-lipped about the location of prospective sites for fear of drawing opposition before feasibility plans are finished.

But Irvine Mayor Christina L. Shea said the Cleveland National Forest and county parks are unlikely prospects. Carona and others say that “the vast majority” of alternatives will be in South County.

Buying affordable property also will depend on the goodwill of landowners, the largest of which are the Irvine Co. and Rancho Mission Viejo.

Richard O’Neill, an owner of Rancho Mission Viejo, said he would oppose any plans to build a jail on his land, which includes large swaths of inland South County.

“We don’t want [a jail] on the ranch. We told them that,” he said. In any case, building that far into the hills would require piping in water--a prohibitively costly measure, he said.

Excluding Rancho’s property, much of the developable land left in South County belongs to the Irvine Co., which a decade ago helped scuttle plans for a proposed jail on its property near Anaheim Hills.

The officials hunting for a new jail site are so intent on winning the Irvine Co.’s support that they have included company representatives in talks with Carona.

The Irvine Co. has expressed concerns about the Musick expansion, saying such a large jail might not be compatible with the surrounding residential communities. But it hasn’t taken a position on locating a jail elsewhere on its land.

“We’ve spent hours and hours with people looking for a site on the ranch, and we don’t have visceral opposition to building on the ranch,” said Larry Thomas, an Irvine Co. spokesman. “But the problem [of finding a site] tends to evaporate when you ask how much it’s going to cost.”

Even if the Irvine Co. agrees to sell, supporters of the deal must convince a majority of the county’s Board of Supervisors that building a new jail is financially prudent. That won’t be easy.

Three of the five supervisors already back expansion of Musick and are wary about repeating past searches for other sites that turned into costly failures.

“It’s going to take three supervisors to approve an alternative site,” said Smith, the Irvine councilman. “I know that they are going to be looking at the bottom line very closely.”

Building a new jail--whether at Musick or elsewhere--is expected to cost more than $50 million, not including operating costs. The county doesn’t have the money in hand and would have to take out loans, issue bonds, raise taxes or seek state money.

Public Has Refused to Pay Price in Past

While the public often decries the early releasing of inmates from overcrowded jails, they have been so far unwilling to pay for new facilities. County voters rejected a 1991 proposed tax hike to build a huge jail at Gypsum Canyon, located near Anaheim Hills. In 1996, a statewide ballot measure to issue jail and prison construction bonds also was defeated.

Smith and others said the county could offset the costs a new jail by selling the Musick property, which is located near prime commercial and residential developments. He estimated that such a sale could net more than $40 million.

As the hunt continues, however, the clock is ticking toward a 2001 deadline, when Carona will have to satisfy a federal court judge that he is easing overcrowding. Since 1978, the county and the Sheriff’s Department have been under a federal court order requiring them to relieve the jail bed crunch. In 1991, a Municipal Court judge sentenced then-Sheriff Gates to 30 days in jail for failing to comply with the order. The sentence was later overturned.

Carona, observers say, will have to work fast if he is to shake off the problem that proved to be his predecessor’s albatross for more than a decade.

“If Gates couldn’t get it done with all the support that he had,” Santa Ana College’s Wright said, “it’s difficult for me to see how Carona will get it done in the near future.”

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Jail On the Trails?

Local officials are searching remote canyon sections of Orange County for a suitable jail site. They have identified nine potential locations in the rugged area roughly between Irvine Lake and San Juan Capistrano. Officials say any jail site must be at least a half-mile from homes. Locating a jail on parkland hasn’t been ruled out, but officials say it’s unlikely.

Source: Times Reports