New Jail in S.D. County Won’t House Any Inmates : Detention: When the $80-million, 784-bed facility is finished, it will remain empty for lack of operating money, a situation that haunts Orange County officials.

OTAY MESA —  In southern San Diego County, on a dry bluff overlooking Mexico, workers are putting the final touches on an $80-million jail.

Come Feb. 22, the East Mesa Jail will be substantially complete, ready for the Sheriff’s Department to take the keys and begin checking out the electronic monitors, food services, alarm-rigged fences and the like. But San Diego County has no money to open the 784-bed facility or an adjacent 264-bed work farm, so when opening day rolls around, officials say, they’ll simply turn out the lights and leave.

Even though it’s happening in San Diego, the fate of the East Mesa Jail gives some Orange County officials chills. Orange County supervisors are expected to vote today on a series of jail proposals that will chart the county’s law-enforcement future, and as the members consider their options, many are trying to learn from San Diego’s experience. For in the parched scrub canyons near the border, one of Orange County’s worst jail nightmares has come true for San Diego.

“The county doesn’t know what the hell it’s going to do,” San Diego Sheriff’s Commander Mel Nichols said Monday. “We have a facility that’s going to be basically state of the art, and we’re not going to be able to use it.”

When the Orange County supervisors take up a host of jail-related issues today, chief among them will be a pair of proposals to reaffirm their support for a controversial plan to build a jail in Gypsum Canyon and to authorize negotiations with the Irvine Co. to buy the land. The Orange County Grand Jury endorsed the Gypsum Canyon jail on Monday, joining the county administrative office and a federally appointed monitor in urging the board to focus on that site, about 10 miles east of Anaheim.

But even if the board presses ahead with Gypsum Canyon--and even if the supervisors come up with a way to buy the land for it--they face a situation all too familiar to San Diego. Like their southern neighbors, Orange County supervisors have no money in their budget to staff a huge new jail, and some officials say the tab for operating the Gypsum Canyon jail could top $100 million a year.

Canyon jail supporters dispute that estimate and say the jail can be downsized to make it more affordable. But both sides agree that without raising county sales taxes--a move that voters show little enthusiasm for--the county will be hard-pressed to pay for operating even a much smaller jail. In fact, the county budget is so lean that it may not be able to fully staff an expansion of the Theo Lacy Branch Jail in Orange, the first phase of which is scheduled to open this fall.

“This really underscores the dilemma that not only Orange County and San Diego but all the counties in California are facing,” said Orange County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, a Gypsum Canyon opponent. “The most striking lesson in all this is that building the facility is less than half the battle.”

Still, Orange County’s overcrowding problems continue to mount and have been described as a “crisis” by a federally appointed monitor, jail expert Lawrence Grossman. Last Sunday, a typical weekend day, the five county jails held 4,434 prisoners--1,231 more than the system was designed to hold.

And that is despite Sheriff Brad Gates’ controversial early-release policies, which put thousands of prisoners on the street every year in order to free badly needed jail beds.

All that is a familiar story in San Diego. Overcrowding has forced thousands of early releases there, and a local judge has capped the inmate population in the county’s six jails. Expanding jail capacity has long been one of the county’s most pressing concerns.

And yet, San Diego officials say they have no idea when the East Mesa Jail will get its first prisoner.

“You can’t imagine how frustrating this has been,” San Diego Sheriff’s Lt. Lee Landrum said Monday as he toured the East Mesa Jail with a reporter and photographer. “We need this jail, but there isn’t any budget to operate it. And if there isn’t a budget, it doesn’t operate. It’s that simple.”

Landrum said it took state aid and some creative county financing to build the jail, but all the money went to construction, leaving the operations budget dry. Yet even without an operations budget to staff the jail when its done, construction in East Mesa goes on.

Barbed wire and chain link fences already surround much of the facility, and most of the 7-by-10-foot cells are complete. Thick sheets of glass divide visitor areas from those of the prisoners. Large panes of the glass are stacked on a hill above the jail, where sheriff’s deputies have been peppering them with gunshots to test their strength.

Within the jail, electronic-monitoring boards are being installed in each of the detention areas, the parking lots have been striped, and the road leading up the side of the canyon is freshly paved. Dozens of workers scurried around the project Monday, welding, putting up fences, installing drywall.

“We’re just about there,” said Landrum, who is the sheriff’s facility-development coordinator for the project. “We’re at that stage where if you’re gone for a couple days, you can really notice the progress when you come back.”

But the budget shortfall looming at the jail’s completion makes hurrying to finish seem pointless. San Diego supervisors have no money to staff the jail this year, and sheriff’s officials say that it will take close to a year to bring the facility up to speed once they get funding.

One key element that San Diego officials had hoped would keep them out of this fix was a 1988 sales tax referendum. After rejecting a similar proposal in 1986, San Diego County voters approved it in 1988, though by the slimmest of margins. Opponents challenged the tax, saying that a two-thirds majority was needed in keeping with Proposition 13.

The opponents won in Superior Court, then lost on appeal. Now the state Supreme Court has agreed to take the case, and its ruling will determine whether the county can spend the money it has been collecting for jail construction and operations.

The outcome of that case is being watched carefully in Orange County, where sales taxes may offer the only chance of dealing with jail overcrowding there. A half-cent tax could raise $125 million a year, enough to pay for operating a Gypsum Canyon jail, though probably not enough to cover the cost of land and construction.

“It’s easy to sit in a room and complain about not having money,” Sheriff Gates said in a recent interview. “There’s no free lunch. We know that. We ought to be putting issues on the ballot and getting the sales tax we need.”