Supervisors Fund New Jail Despite Santee’s Protests

Proceeding with plans to build a temporary men’s jail in Santee despite the city’s legal opposition, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday appropriated $4.7 million to construct the new facility and finance its operation.

By a unanimous vote, the supervisors, without debate, formally set aside funds that had been earmarked for the project last month when the board voted to build the 600-bed temporary men’s jail adjacent to the Las Colinas County Jail for women in Santee.

The board’s action came one day after a Superior Court judge rejected Santee’s request that the county be stopped from moving ahead with plans for the temporary jail, envisioned as an interim answer to the county’s longstanding jail overcrowding.

In denying Santee’s request for a temporary restraining order, Judge Andrew Wagner said that such an order would be premature and pointed out that the board action would not preclude Santee from later proceeding with its attempt to block construction of the jail. Another court hearing on the matter is scheduled for Sept. 4.

First-Year Cost $5.9 Million

Under Tuesday’s action, the board appropriated $2.3 million for construction costs and $2.4 million for staffing and operational expenses associated with the proposed barracks-style jail. Combined with funds previously approved for initial engineering and construction costs, the project’s overall first-year price tag is about $5.9 million--$439,000 less than original estimates, county officials said.

That cost reduction is primarily attributable to the board’s decision to help staff the temporary men’s jail and the Las Colinas women’s facility not with deputy sheriffs, as is Sheriff John Duffy’s current practice, but rather with lesser-paid corrections officers.

After bitterly criticizing that proposed staffing change last month as “wholly inappropriate,” Duffy ultimately acquiesced to the board’s desire to use the so-called “limited-duty deputies” in the jails. As a result of what one top county administrator characterized as “a cooperative spirit on both sides,” an anticipated showdown between Duffy and the supervisors over the key policy question failed to materialize at Tuesday’s meeting.

However, in a letter sent to the board, Duffy, contending that it would be impractical to staff the temporary Santee jail primarily with newly hired officers, indicated that he plans to spread the 100 new officers throughout the county’s existing six detention facilities.

Impact Report Still Due

Rich Robinson, director of the county’s special projects office, described Tuesday’s board action as a preliminary step that “just sets up the accounts that will be used” to finance the temporary jail’s construction and operation. Most of the funds appropriated Tuesday are unlikely to be spent or even “firmly committed,” Robinson said, until after an environmental impact report on the proposed jail is completed this fall.

Any money spent before then, Robinson explained, “would be at risk,” because an adverse environmental impact statement conceivably could block the jail project.

“Contrary to what Santee says, we’re doing this thing by the numbers,” Robinson said. “There’s no effort to fast-track it or subvert normal county policies and procedures.”

During Monday’s court hearing, however, Santee City Atty. Donald McLean complained that the county is “proceeding with the project” prior to the completion of the environmental impact report. By moving ahead with plans to hire jail employees and to purchase security equipment, kitchen equipment and other hardware, the county may downgrade the environmental report into little more than “an after-the-fact rationalization” of the project, McLean argued.

Robinson explained that any preliminary work done to date on the jail project “had to be done hand in hand” with the environmental study.

“Some engineering work had to be done because the environmental impact report requires some knowledge, for example, of where the facility is actually going to be located on the site and what the infrastructure will look like,” Robinson said. “Nothing sinister or sneaky is being done. We’re doing what has to be done to complete the report.”

In the ‘Heart’ of Town

Santee officials and residents have complained that the 600-bed jail will be near schools, houses and a senior center and will seriously undermine the city’s redevelopment efforts by placing what Mayor Jack Doyle describes as a “concentration camp complete with barbed wire and armed watchtowers in the heart of our community.”

Saying that their city already has borne its fair share of regional responsibilities, Santee leaders also have emphasized that they already house Las Colinas, which is to be expanded by nearly 200 beds, the Edgemoor geriatric and mental hospital and a water reclamation plant.

County officials, however, argue that the Santee site offers the quickest--if not perhaps the best--solution to a difficult problem, at a time when the inmate population in the county’s six jails is nearly double capacity. Supervisor George Bailey, whose East County district includes Santee, is the only supervisor who opposes locating the temporary jail there.

Assuming that the environmental report and the board’s subsequent review of that study does not delay the projected timetable, construction could begin in November and be completed by early 1988, Robinson said. It could take up to a year longer, the supervisors said, to build a temporary jail elsewhere.

To placate Santee residents, the supervisors indicated earlier this summer that they intend to close the temporary facility after a proposed 850-bed jail in East Otay Mesa opens, the County Jail in Vista is expanded and a 500-to-1,000-bed jail at an undetermined location is built--projects that the county expects to complete by 1991.

But because the supervisors have pointedly refused to make an iron-clad guarantee on a projected closure date, Santee officials have said that they fear that the “temporary” facility might remain open long after 1991.