Delano’s Grand Illusion

State Route 99 bisects the hardscrabble central valley farm town of Delano from north to south. Eleventh Avenue takes you east into the business district. Just before you cross the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, you can see empty lots and the fire-scorched ruins of what once was Delano’s “Chinatown” district. Redevelopment got rid of what the city considered a crime-ridden blight--29 bars and nightclubs in only three blocks--but nothing has taken its place.

A short distance to the east, Central Valley Office Supply’s neighbors on one block of Main Street include a 98-Cent Market, the 99-Cent Delano Discount market, a cash advance center and an abandoned theater. “There’s not many things to do here,” complains 16-year-old Nancy Arredondo. “Teenagers don’t know what to do except get in trouble with the police.” The city has provided park benches to improve the ambience, but Shawn Clark, the office supply store’s owner, describes it as “a park-like atmosphere for vagrants to hang out in.”

Sadly, Delano’s plight isn’t terribly unusual among poor, small towns across the country. But it does have a distinction most others do not. On top of the poverty and blight, Delano can stack dashed hopes.

More than a decade ago, state officials convinced Delano city leaders that the 2,450-bed North Kern State Prison would provide a badly needed economic boost to the town. City fathers, in turn, sold North Kern State to citizens as a panacea for a town wracked by double-digit unemployment.

The city embraced the prison when it opened in April 1993. After all, this is a community whose history is etched with hope. Founded as a railroad town in 1873, Delano owes much of its growth to its rich soil and a steady flow of Latino immigrants who pick table grapes, kiwi fruit and other agricultural products. It was here that Cesar Chavez worked in the vineyards and, in 1962, where he established what became the United Farm Workers union.

The state is now building a second prison in Delano--the state’s 24th new penitentiary in 20 years--amid more predictions of better days to come. Just down the two-lane blacktop from North Kern State, construction workers are busy clearing 640 acres that are the site for “Delano II.” It eventually will house 4,500 inmates, most of them violent offenders. Clark--who hustles constantly for new business and is one of the few locals to profit from the first prison--can hardly wait. “It gives me goose bumps just thinking about having another prison in town,” he says.

Quite a few other people who live and work in Delano are getting goose bumps about the new prison, too, but for an entirely different reason. They wonder what happened to their “gray gold”--the river of jobs, sales tax revenue and other economic goodies that were supposed to flow from having a prison nearby. They now believe they were sold fool’s gold, that--notwithstanding the occasional success story such as Clark’s--a pall of economic gloom as thick as the Central Valley’s tule fog still envelops their town. With the new prison set to open in 2004, Jean Flores, a trustee of the Delano Joint Unified School District, speaks for many in this forlorn little place. “Basically, to me, Delano is like a ghost town.”

Delano II may, in fact, be the most controversial prison project in California history. It was first proposed in the early 1990s, but the state chose to build a prison at Corcoran in nearby Kings County. After Gov. Gray Davis took office in 1999--he received $2 million in campaign contributions from the correctional officers union--the new governor resurrected the plan for Delano II and included $335 million in funding for it in his first budget. Most of the money would come from lease-revenue bonds, which do not require voter approval.

In the Legislature, Kern County Assemblyman Dean Florez took the reins, creating a bill that authorized the corrections department to build a 2,248-cell maximum-security prison. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in June 1999. “AB 1535 not only addresses the [prison] overcrowding problem but also provides a needed economic boost in Delano by creating an estimated 700 new jobs and $4 million to the local economy,” Florez proclaimed.

To critics of the state’s prison-building binge, the timing could not have been more dubious. In 1999, crime rates dropped for the eighth straight year; the state’s inmate population showed its smallest increase in 20 years and was almost 10,000 below the state’s forecast. Still, agency officials insisted that, based on California’s projected growth, another prison was justified, particularly one housing the most violent offenders.

But as Delano II proceeded through environmental review, activist groups--including Critical Resistance and the National Lawyers Guild Prison Law Project--filed suit in Kern County to block the project. They claimed the state had not adequately addressed the potential environmental impact of building what amounted to a small city. They also raised the “absolute lack of a necessity of having a [second] prison” and challenged the wisdom of developing land that could be used for agriculture.

Another plaintiff had an unusual client--an endangered rodent with habitat on the proposed Delano II site. Superior Court Judge Roger M. Randall soon ruled that only the Friends of the Kangaroo Rat were actually present in Kern County and had legal “standing” to sue. In June 2001, he gave them a partial victory, ruling that the state needed to take a closer look at issues such as water and traffic impacts.

By the end of last year, opposition to Delano II also was mounting on the political front. Inmate numbers were continuing to decline (from 162,000 last year to the current 156,000), while the prison agency reported a record budget overrun of $277 million. This wasn’t exactly good news with the state facing a budget shortfall projected at about $20 billion. “All we’re going to do is build on the problem you have” by authorizing another prison, state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) lectured corrections officials.

Delano, it turns out, isn’t alone in its disappointment. Other poor farming towns in the Central Valley are waiting for the promised benefits from prisons built in their midst. Critical Resistance and its allies have pointed to data indicating that the Central Valley’s prisons have been an economic bust despite $2 billion in construction and half a billion dollars a year in payroll. Unemployment in the valley, for example, remained at three times the state average, and less than 10% of prison jobs went to people from the host communities.

But on April 4, Judge Randall approved the state’s revised environmental impact report. Then, in June, a budget bill that includes funding for Delano II emerged from a conference committee of the state Assembly and Senate. It now awaits a final vote. The current price tag, including interest on the lease-revenue bonds: about $600 million--nearly twice the original estimate.

Some of the state’s major newspapers have joined the chorus of opposition. “Surely [Gov.] Davis can recognize that building Delano now would be a boondoggle,” the Los Angeles Times said in a recent editorial. The activists have taken the legal battle to an appeals court in Fresno.

“The department is hell-bent on building Delano II,” says Rose Braz, an attorney with Critical Resistance in Oakland. “Our coalition is hell-bent on stopping Delano II.”

Although contractors for the state have started grading the Delano II site, they do not have a green light to proceed with construction of any buildings. You won’t find any of Delano’s 38,000 residents there chained to bulldozers and, around town, there’s no visible sign of the controversy. The City Council signed off on the revised environmental impact report by a 3-2 vote.

Delano, nevertheless, could be Exhibit A in the case against prisons as engines of economic progress. “They’re down at the bottom” of prison towns in rural California, says Ruth Wilson Gilmore, a professor of geography at UC Berkeley who is writing a book about the economic impact of the state’s prisons. “That town’s doing very poorly.”

Shawn Clark, on the other hand, is doing quite well. when he bought his office supply store in Delano in 1992, it sold little more than “novelty crap,” he says. “We were a big nothing,” with sales of only $16,000 a month.

But Clark, a gravel-voiced entrepreneur who grew up in Delano, saw opportunity in the fields just west of town where the corrections agency was building North Kern State Prison during the nation’s largest prison construction boom. Long before the facility received its first inmate in 1993, Clark was driving out from Delano in his pickup and hustling orders from management.

“When they had three people out there, I delivered a dozen pencils and two rolls of fax paper,” he says. “I got there within 15 minutes of their phone call.”

Clark learned how to navigate the prison system’s daunting procurement bureaucracy and regulations--”The guy in the [warehouse receiving] ‘cage’ knows more than the procurement officer,” he advises. When the state went into a budget crisis, Clark, unlike many other vendors, still accepted the prison’s purchase orders.

Clark now supplies everything from shower curtains to television sets to North Kern State--as well as to 20 other state prisons in California. If a prison needs it, Clark--operating like a civilian version of “Catch-22’s” Milo Minderbinder--can usually get it. Central Valley Office Supply is still based in a modest store on Delano’s drab Main Street, but now it generates about $1.5 million a year in sales, about half of that to prisons. “They gave me an opportunity,” Clark says in his cramped office, which is decorated as a shrine to NFL great Joe Montana.

But Clark’s success as a statewide prison supplier also pokes a hole in the argument that prisons bring local prosperity: He’s getting some of the money that prison supporters claimed would go to businesses in Avenal, Corcoran, Chowchilla and other Central Valley prison towns that welcomed penitentiaries with open arms and visions of gray gold.

More than nine years after North Kern State opened, the major retailer in Delano is a Kmart on the northern edge of town. Residents worry it could close because of the parent company’s recent bankruptcy filing. To the west of SR 99, on the same side of town as the prison sites, there is no commercial development beyond a convenience store, a budget motel and a strip mall. Here many of the town’s farm laborers live in scruffy single-family homes or trailers, and the streets are rutted with potholes. The UFW uses 40 acres for training programs; the city uses another plot of land for sewage treatment.

Jean Flores has spent most of her life in Delano. She lives on the west side and works downtown in a storefront legal office decorated with photographs of Chavez. She is in her eighth year on the school board and also is president of the city’s police commission. Her husband, Gil, serves on the City Council--he was one of the members who voted against approving the Delano II environmental report.

With a somewhat world-weary air and rings on nine of her fingers, Flores can remember a more vibrant pre-prison downtown. “We had a Morris department store, a fabric store, a hardware store,” she says. Now she has to drive 30 miles south to Bakersfield just to buy a spool of thread. “Does that make sense?” she asks.

Flores also can remember the economic hope that greeted Delano’s first prison. “Everybody was under the impression there were going to be lots of jobs,” she says.

It was the same hope that spread like locusts around the Central Valley in the 1980s. The administration of Gov. George Deukmejian had launched what would be a $5-billion construction program that, in the space of less than 20 years, would triple California’s total number of prisons to 33. Amid resistance from urban residents who weren’t too keen on having prisons in their backyards, officials focused on sparsely populated rural areas as more suitable locations. “We’re prone to work with communities that ... throw out the red carpet for us,” the director of the corrections department told the Legislature in 1988.

The department touted the new prisons as recession-proof and nonpolluting. In the Central Valley, it got the red carpet treatment from towns buffeted by the instability of the region’s agriculture-based economy. Avenal opened its prison in 1987, followed by Corcoran in 1988 and Chowchilla in 1990.

California’s agricultural drought of 1987-1992 hit Delano hard, sending city officials out in search of their own prison. Built on near-barren land, North Kern State Prison would be used primarily as a reception center for inmates on their way to other institutions. When full, according to state estimates at the time, it would employ 870 workers ranging from correctional officers to clerical assistants, with an average annual salary of $30,500--not bad for a community with an unemployment rate of more than 25% and a median household income of slightly more than $21,000. The total payroll of $26.5 million would be three times Delano’s annual budget of $8.5 million.

“This City Council, they’ll turn flip-flops for something that brings in 100 jobs, 50 jobs,” observes Bob Cane, editor of the weekly Delano Record newspaper.

Officials expected more economic payoff than just job creation. The economic theory also held that prison employees would patronize local stores, fueling increased sales tax revenue. With more revenue, the city could offer improved services. And all of that would make Delano a more attractive place to live. A very desirable “domino effect.”

The reality has been more like a doldrums effect. Delano residents have gotten only between 7% and 9% of North Kern State jobs, many of them lower-paying service positions, and unemployment is still around 26%. Per-person sales tax revenue dropped from $65.15 in 1993-1994 to $53.15 in 1999-2000.

As elsewhere in the Central Valley prison complex, Delano has run into what you might call “prisonomics.” Prison recruiters fish from a statewide pool, giving no preference to local applicants. Employees with seniority are first in line for positions at new prisons. In Delano, where Latinos account for two-thirds of the population, residents may not have the English-language skills or high school diploma to qualify for the state hiring list.

Once they work in Delano, moreover, most prison employees don’t live there, preferring the superior amenities of nearby cities such as Bakersfield and Visalia, even if it means a 40-minute commute each way. They might stop at the Fastrip gas station off SR 99 for morning coffee or grab a taco at one of the fast-food restaurants, but the significant benefits of their spending are going elsewhere. Delano’s recruitment brochure for a community development director makes no mention of the prison among its economic attributes.

At her office, Flores sums up what she believes North Kern State has done for Delano. “As far as economic development, it’s pretty much shut that down,” she says. Then, throwing up her hands, she adds: “Would you like to live near a prison?”

So what on earth is Delano doing welcoming another prison to its fields? How come residents aren’t marching to the site and chaining themselves in protest to bulldozers, with banners proclaiming, “Save the Kangaroo Rat” in hand?

One hypothesis is that Delano’s citizenry lacks the sophistication and resources to analyze a major state project like a prison, decipher an environmental impact report and mount an effective campaign against it. That’s why the burden fell on “outsider” organizations such as Critical Resistance. Napoleon Madrid, a former Delano mayor, points to a sense of resignation. “People had gotten accustomed to the first prison,” he says. “They look at it as almost a foregone conclusion that the second prison is coming in.”

At the red brick, two-story City Hall, the current mayor has a positive spin on North Kern State. “I’ve been supportive of the prison from Day One,” Art Armendariz says. “We needed a stimulus and that was it.” Counting North Kern State and two nearby prisons in McFarland and Wasco, the Department of Corrections has provided jobs for about 500 Delano residents, he estimates.

Armendariz’s enthusiasm may have something to do with his job as community resources manager at the Wasco prison. But asked if his loyalties are divided, he shakes his head. “No,” he says. The prison job “does not conflict” with his civic responsibilities.

The mayor, a lean, energetic man equipped with two cell phones, concedes that North Kern State has not met economic expectations. But he believes the city can do a better job of helping residents through the state hiring process the second time around. “It’s all about educating citizens how to go about getting a job,” he says, predicting that 25% to 30% of Delano II jobs could go to the town.

As for boosting sales tax revenue, Armendariz says that can be accomplished by developing the town as a regional shopping venue. Prison employees “will shop here before they go home.” He notes that the city is negotiating with developers to transform “Chinatown” into a multi-block commercial center.

A few blocks away, Shawn Clark also sees plenty of prison-related opportunities ahead for Delano’s business owners--if only they would follow his example. “You’ve got to be willing to do anything to get business,” he says. “It’s about putting in the effort, the time and the money. Absolutely every prison that is built, I’ll put in that effort.”

Clark’s free-market faith isn’t enough, however, for activist Rose Braz. “He would be doing well if the prison was located in Beverly Hills,” she says. “I have no doubt there’s anecdotal evidence of people benefiting [from prisons]. But globally, if you look at the history, are prisons economic drivers? The answer is, ‘No.’ ”

She and others contend that Armendariz’s Delano II job estimates are too high, given the statewide competition for prison jobs, and that he is putting the economic cart before the horse. Major retailers, they say, will not come to Delano unless local consumers have enough disposable income to justify it. And unless consumers get prison jobs or other high-paying employment, they won’t have that income.

Elsewhere in the Central Valley, the penitentiary parade goes on. In Arvin, another economically depressed Kern County farm town, city officials have been lobbying for a state or federal prison. “The impact would be tremendous,” enthuses Mayor Juan Olivares.

Former Mayor Madrid lobbied for Delano II when he was in office. “It’s a clean industry and it does provide jobs,” he says. “Just one person getting a job, that’s a positive impact.”

But there’s one message that Madrid feels should ring loud and clear before the state builds any more prisons in rural California. “People look on them as economic development tools. They’re not. Cities should not use the Department of Corrections for economic development.”