Sale of Property Clouds Outlook for L.A. Prison

SACRAMENTO —  In a sharp setback to the Deukmejian Administration’s plan to build a prison near downtown Los Angeles, the owners of a key parcel at the proposed site are selling their land for more than $5 million to a firm planning an industrial development, The Times has learned.

Both the present owners of the parcel, Crown Coach International, and the firm purchasing the property, Ramser Development Co., say the deal effectively shuts the door on construction of a prison on the site, two miles from the Civic Center near Boyle Heights.

Community Opposition

Community leaders in heavily Latino Boyle Heights had strongly opposed building the prison in the vicinity and had sponsored demonstrations at the state Capitol in a successful lobbying effort to discourage the Legislature from appropriating money for the property purchase.

The Administration’s chief negotiator and lobbyist on the prison issue--Robert J. Blonien, undersecretary of the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency--could not be reached for comment late Tuesday.

The escape clause on the private purchase agreement expired Tuesday, cementing a sale that will be formally completed in a few months, said Llewellyn C. Werner, chairman of the board of Crown Coach, a firm best known for manufacturing school buses.

Crown Coach is selling the property to the private developer for somewhat more than the price that the state had offered, Werner said.

“The school bus door has been shut,” Werner said in an interview, noting that after two years of negotiation with Crown Coach, the Administration would have to turn to the new owners if the state Department of Corrections still wants to acquire the property.

However, Ramser Development has no desire to sell, said Scott Ramser, managing partner for the company that he and his grandfather, Harold C. Ramser, founded earlier this year.

“I do see (the sale) as closing the door to the prison,” Ramser said. He added that his firm intends to break ground on a 300,000 square-foot industrial complex on the 9-acre parcel in the spring. The land is central to a 20-acre site that the Administration chose for a 1,700-inmate medium security prison.

‘Terrific News’

Democratic Assemblywoman Gloria Molina, a leader in the fight against building a prison at the Crown Coach site, which lies within her district, called the sale “terrific news. Our understanding was that Sen. (Robert) Presley (D-Riverside) had a bill scheduled for the first week of the session, and we were preparing to continue to wage our war.”

Molina said her Eastside district has been “exhausted as a community” by the prison fight, but she said the struggle has produced an increased level of community unity.

“All the credit belongs to the community,” she said, “not to the politicians.”

The proposed site on the southeast side of downtown is bounded by Olympic Boulevard, Santa Fe Avenue, 15th Street and the Los Angeles River.

Werner said that his firm decided to sell the parcel because the Administration and the Senate could not reach an agreement to move ahead with the construction of a prison on the property.

‘Cloud of Uncertainty’

“The continuing cloud of uncertainty which has swirled around this project has cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Werner said. “The up and down, roller coaster-like atmosphere is not tolerable.”

He added that the sometimes bitter battle over the choice of a prison site was a factor in his firm’s decision. “I don’t like reading about my company every day being enmeshed in controversy,” he said.

Gov. George Deukmejian stood firmly behind the choice of the site, despite growing opposition from residents and businesses from the nearby largely Latino community.

Deukmejian even called the Legislature into special session in September after the Senate failed to approve a bill that would allow the purchase of the property. Under existing statutes, new prisons at Stockton and at Otay Mesa in San Diego County cannot be opened until a site is chosen for a new prison in Los Angeles County--a provision written into law by legislators who argued that the state’s most populous county was long overdue for its first state-run facility.

When the Senate failed to act, the Republican governor blamed Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti of Los Angeles, accusing the Democratic lawmaker of “inept leadership” and faulting him for the Legislature’s failure to take the steps needed to relieve a severely overcrowded prison system.

Legislatures’s Agenda

Roberti accused Deukmejian of trying to make the prison a political issue in a year in which the governor was seeking reelection. Resolving the prison issue is certain to be high on the Legislature’s agenda when it reconvenes Jan. 5, and there has been talk of a possible compromise that would allow the new prisons to open while the Department of Corrections completes a review of the Crown Coach property as well as another undesignated site in the county.

With the announcement of the sale, embattled corrections officials are more likely to have to renew their search for a suitable prison site in Los Angeles County, even without any legislative action.

Crown Coach’s Werner described the sale of the property as “officially closed.” With the end of a 30-day waiting period, Crown Coach received on Tuesday a contingency fee that Werner would only describe as well into six figures. He estimated that Ramser Development has spent more than $500,000 on the deal--including extensive testing to determine whether toxic waste from an adjacent property had contaminated soil on the parcel.

Werner said that Crown Coach had owned the parcel for about 60 years, but had moved most of its manufacturing operations to a new plant in Chino in 1984. For the past few years, about 100 workers at the downtown location have produced components for Crown Coach products, heavy transportation equipment that includes school buses and fire trucks.

Appraisal Questioned

Werner said that the firm has been eager to sell the property and had agreed to sell it to the state for its appraised value, about $5 million. That appraisal was criticized by lawmakers who opposed the site selection and by the nonpartisan legislative analyst’s office, whose auditors said that the figure failed to take into account possible problems with toxic contamination from adjacent property. The Ramser sale price supports the original appraisal, Werner said.

The new owners are planning an industrial park--a mix of warehouses and light manufacturing, according to Ramser. He said his firm has a number of similar projects under way or complete near downtown Los Angeles, which he described as an area of steady growth and climbing real estate values.

Ramser said that one of his potential tenants at the site would employ as many as 800 workers.