County Problems Outnumber Solutions : Finances: Shrinking revenues will put to increasing test creativity in coping with overcrowded jails, unemployment, welfare demands and other needs.

By JIM NEWTON

Dec. 31, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SANTA ANA — The guardians of Orange County government enter 1992 with a bushel of problems, a handful of proposed solutions and a budget that is shrinking so fast that every month seems to bring more bad news.

The jails are overcrowded, as is Juvenile Hall. Unemployment is up, and welfare demands are growing by the day. In fact, about the only things dropping are tax revenue and consumer confidence, the pillars that keep the roof from caving in on local government.

So what’s a county official to do?

“We’re going to have to get real creative,” said County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider. “We’ve got a lot of problems.”

That creativity will be tested early as the Board of Supervisors tackles several of the county’s hottest issues in January. Jails, landfills and campaign finance--three topics that dogged the supervisors in 1991--are all expected to be on the board agendas in January, just in time for Supervisor Roger R. Stanton to take over as the board’s new chairman.

By midyear, politics will intervene, too, as both Stanton and Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez face reelection in 1992.

Vasquez, who served as chairman in 1991 and will relinquish that post in January, said Stanton can expect to have his hands full during his chairmanship. But Vasquez is among those who believe that the difficult times currently facing county government may have some good side effects.

“The economic issues are forcing us to re-evaluate the way that we do business,” Vasquez said. “I don’t think that it will ever be business-as-usual again.”

That will make for some wrenching debates, Vasquez and others agree. The county already anticipates a shortfall next year of nearly $70 million, and that’s if the supervisors can cut $15 million to $21 million from this year’s spending. Layoffs are possible, as are serious cutbacks in a number of government programs.

But, Vasquez adds: “It’s exciting. We could be on the verge of a transformation or a revolution in the way government operates.”

While officials figure out how that revolution shakes out, there are immediate and pressing issues dogging the government:

* Where should the county put a new landfill?

* How can the government assist county welfare recipients when it is desperately short of cash?

* How should the county pay for increasingly expensive medical programs when the money to fund them comes from depleted sales tax revenues?

* And, most pointedly, where can the county government afford to house the county’s ever-growing jail population?

If experience is any guide, the jail issue will dog the supervisors in 1992, just as it has off and on since 1978. But this year will bring an added intensity to that debate, since the board voted in 1991 to drop the only proposal for a new jail then pending.

That pleased residents of Anaheim because that plan called for a 6,720-bed facility to be built on the outskirts of the city. But it left the supervisors with few choices for relieving jail overcrowding that has reached the point where roughly 850 prisoners are freed early every week in order to make room for more.

By year’s end, the overcrowding debate is expected to bring Sheriff Brad Gates to center stage again as Municipal Court judges press their case that he should be punished for the early releases. Some of those releases violate state law, and the sheriff should be held in contempt, the judges say.

A Superior Court judge disagreed in 1991, but the Municipal Court judges are pressing ahead with an appeal--and in the process expect to spend roughly another $10,000 of taxpayer money to make their case.