U.S. Courthouse in Laguna Niguel Urged : Justice: General Services Administration recommends a South County site for a $78-million facility but Rep. Cox wants to take a closer look.

WASHINGTON —  The General Services Administration has recommended building a new federal courthouse and office building for Orange County on a 92-acre tract in Laguna Niguel, but the congressman who represents the area said Wednesday that the site selection is far from certain.

“This is the first step in building a courthouse for Orange County,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach), who two years ago shepherded a resolution through the House Committee on Public Works and Transportation directing the GSA to undertake the study.

“What I would like to do now is analyze this from the consumer standpoint,” Cox said. “We want a courthouse to serve the public, and the question is, ‘In which location would the public best be served?’ ”

The GSA recommendation does not necessarily mean the courthouse will be built on the federally owned site, which sits off La Paz Road just south of Pacific Park Drive. Congress must hold hearings on the plan and then appropriate money for the project. The GSA has estimated the total cost, including design and construction management, of a 218,000-square-foot facility at $77.5 million to $79.8 million.

The only federal judges now sitting in Orange County hold court in a leased, 30,000-square-foot temporary structure in Santa Ana’s Civic Center Plaza. Orange County is part of the federal judicial system’s Central District of California, based in Los Angeles.

Cox and other members of the Orange County congressional delegation have argued that the county, with 2.4 million residents, needs its own federal courthouse. “We routinely authorize and fund the construction of courthouses for communities of 500,000,” Cox said.

Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) has introduced legislation calling for creation of a new federal judicial district, the Western District of California, that would include Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. However, the move is opposed by key members of the federal judiciary.

The GSA, which is the custodian of federal property, considered two possible locations for a new Orange County courthouse--Santa Ana, the county seat, and Laguna Niguel, site of an existing 850,000-square-foot federal building.

The agency concluded that the project would cost about $3 million more in Santa Ana because the GSA would have to acquire property instead of using land already owned by the federal government. The GSA eliminated from consideration federally owned land across the street from the existing Santa Ana Federal Building because the site would not accommodate outside parking and would have no room for expansion.

The GSA said incorporating a parking garage into a Santa Ana courthouse would be prohibitively expensive “due to the nature of foundation and structural reinforcement requirements in buildings with multilevel inside parking.”

But Cox said he wants more information before he concurs in that analysis.

Laguna Niguel City Manager Timothy Casey said Wednesday he is unsure how the city would respond to the proposal. “It’s obviously something we have not focused any attention on to date,” he said. “The first reaction is (that) such a project might bring some special distinction to Laguna Niguel.”

In addition, the city could benefit economically, Casey said, since construction of a courthouse would likely be followed by the development of office buildings for attorneys and other professionals.

On the other hand, Casey said, city officials must gauge community reaction to a project that could affect traffic, the environment and might include a small jail for holding defendants in criminal cases.

“Some people are suspicious that the element that would be involved with the federal courthouse would not be the most savory of characters,” said City Council member Paul Christiansen. “This is mostly a criminal element of drug dealers and other major federal violators.”

In the final analysis, the city may have little to say about whether the federal courthouse is built in Laguna Niguel, Christiansen said.

“It’s my general understanding the city is absolutely powerless when it comes to regulating control over a federal agency,” he said.

Times correspondent Leslie Earnest in Orange County contributed to this report.