Unified Attack Planned Against Paired Prisons

Los Angeles and Lancaster city officials and a Los Angeles county supervisor Tuesday began preparing a three-pronged assault on a political compromise plan to build two carefully paired prisons in the heart of the city and in the northern desert suburb.

The Lancaster City Council voted unanimously to file a lawsuit challenging the validity of an environmental study, approved last week by the state Department of Corrections, of the Lancaster prison proposal.

Earlier Tuesday, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich asked the County Board of Supervisors to authorize county attorneys to take “all necessary legal actions, including the filing of a lawsuit against the state” to prevent construction of the proposed 232-acre, 2,200-bed Antelope Valley prison.

The board will vote on that measure Jan. 9, an Antonovich spokesman said. The Lancaster City Council instructed city attorneys to meet with county attorneys to study the possibility of joint legal action.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley on Tuesday urged the Los Angeles City Council to sue the state to block construction of a companion prison on a 20-acre site in East Los Angeles.

The two prisons are part of a bipartisan compromise reached in 1987 after intense debate between Republican Gov. George Deukmejian and Democratic state legislators, who agreed to locate one prison in heavily Democratic East Los Angeles and the other in the heavily Republican Antelope Valley.

Lancaster business and community leaders are opposed to the prison, which officials plan to begin constructing at Avenue J and 60th Street West this summer. But under the compromise legislation, opponents of the prison have only until Jan. 29 to take legal action.

Lancaster Councilman William Pursley, the city representative on a citizen’s committee fighting the prison, said the city should work to relocate the prison site to a less populated area of the Antelope Valley.

“Stopping the prison would be an extremely difficult, if not impossible, goal,” Pursley said. “If it’s possible, we’re going to move the site.”

Real estate agent Danielle Lewis, head of the anti-prison committee, welcomed the council action and urged the council to include a member of her group on a “blue-ribbon committee” proposed by Pursely to lobby for relocating the prison. Pursely said he hopes that committee will include himself, Antonovich, state Republican Chairman and local developer Frank Visco, and former Lancaster City Manager James Gilley.

The Lancaster prison would be built on county-owned land to be acquired by the state. But Antonovich told his fellow supervisors Monday that state officials have ignored the county’s need to use the land for expanded health, fire, law enforcement, probation and animal care services.

He said the Department of Corrections has acted “despite the opposition of this board, Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, the city of Lancaster and many community groups.”

Opponents say the prison site lies in the path of residential development on Lancaster’s west side, which has grown in recent years with annexations of county land by the city. Opponents feel the state’s environmental impact report is legally vulnerable because it concludes the prison would not have a negative impact on property values, water supplies or the quality of life in surrounding neighborhoods.