County Affirms Vote for Jail in Anaheim; City Begins Lawsuit

The Orange County Board of Supervisors ended Ralph B. Clark’s 16-year term as supervisor on a bitter note Wednesday, voting 4 to 1 against him to put a 1,581-inmate jail near Anaheim Stadium. Within minutes the city filed a lawsuit challenging the action.

“It’s too bad that my last vote as a supervisor . . . has to end up like that,” said Clark, ending his last public meeting as representative of the district that includes Anaheim.

The supervisors had voted 4 to 1 on March 18 to designate the parcel at Katella Avenue and Douglass Road, half a mile from Anaheim Stadium, as the “preferred” site for a $141-million maximum-security jail.

Quick Action Urged

After receiving an environmental impact report on the site and three alternate locations, supervisors upheld their original choice and voted to have work on the jail begin “as expeditiously as possible.”

The action came after one of the longest board meetings in years, a 7 1/2-hour session that dealt with several controversial topics and forced supervisors to send out for sandwiches and eat while conducting public hearings.

The jail discussion alone took two hours, featuring denunciations of the county’s action by newly elected Anaheim Mayor Ben Bay; by the city’s special attorney in the matter, Pierce O’Donnell, and by a member of the Jail Action Committee, a coalition of Anaheim residents and businesses, including Disneyland, the California Angels baseball team and the Los Angeles Rams football team.

It was O’Donnell who announced outside the supervisors’ hearing room, immediately after the vote, that the city had just filed a lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court contending that the county environmental report was “a charade, a paper shuffle, a ruse and a violation of the law.”

O’Donnell charged that the board made up its mind even before the impact report was issued, a claim the supervisors denied.

The supervisors’ vote came as no surprise to anyone, including O’Donnell, who had copies of the 143-page lawsuit already prepared for reporters as soon as the meeting ended.

O’Donnell had told supervisors earlier that the city would fight the county in “the courts of law and the courts of public opinion.”

He predicted that “an aroused citizenry, led reluctantly by the citizens of Anaheim, will rise up and oppose this fiercely,” leading a campaign against a bond issue to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the new jail and a 5,000-inmate jail the county wants to build on a remote site yet to be chosen.

County officials have discussed putting a bond measure on the ballot next November or in June of 1988. Two-thirds of the voters would have to approve.

Although O’Donnell, Bay and a specialist in jail systems hired by the Jail Action Committee told the board that there was no rush to build a new facility, the supervisors pointed out the pressure imposed on the county by U.S. District Judge William P. Gray.

In March, 1985, Gray found the board and Sheriff Brad Gates in contempt for not heeding his 1978 order to end overcrowding in the main men’s jail in Santa Ana.

Since then, the county has expanded its branch jails, launched new programs to keep low-risk offenders out of jail and turned away people who were arrested for public drunkenness. In addition, a new building to hold inmates being booked into the jail or being released, with 350 beds, is due to open next year next to the main facility in Santa Ana.

But with Judge Gray steadily lowering the maximum number of inmates allowed in the main men’s jail, supervisors decided that they needed a new building quickly. That led them last March to concentrate on county-owned land to save time that would otherwise be spent negotiating the purchase of private land.

Anaheim jail opponents have contended all along that the county would not really save time because a lawsuit was a certainty, delaying the jail at Katella and Douglass, a vacant parcel once intended as a trash-transfer station. Instead, the opponents said, the county could build just a single jail at a remote site.

But Supervisor Bruce Nestande said that any site picked will be challenged in court by people living nearby. “You have to plan on a year (or) a year and a half in court, no matter what site they pick,” he said.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday charged that the county violated the law by not submitting the project to the Anaheim Planning Commission, that it approved a project incompatible with the county’s general plan and failed to fully define the project and completely analyze all the impacts.

The lawsuit asked the court to bar work on the jail site until “an adequate, complete and objective” environmental impact report is prepared.

The county had hired an outside attorney specializing in environmental law while it prepared the report, and he advised supervisors that the law was followed.

But Clark, a constant foe of the Anaheim site, continued his opposition to the end, saying he had “never disagreed as strongly with my colleagues about a major county issue in all the 16 years that I’ve been here.”

The supervisor, a former Anaheim mayor, said it was a waste of energy and money to plan a jail and defend against lawsuits for a facility “that will never be built.”

“It will be the most expensive jail that was never built,” said Clark.