Deukmejian Vows to Fight for Downtown Prison Site

SACRAMENTO —  Despite the surprise sale of land near downtown Los Angeles that Gov. George Deukmejian wants for a controversial state prison, the governor served notice Wednesday that he is not prepared to give up on obtaining the site.

Two of Deukmejian’s top assistants, Chief of Staff Steven A. Merksamer and Press Secretary Larry Thomas, said the governor is still looking at ways for the state to acquire a key parcel of the proposed prison site, which is being sold to a private developer for more than $5 million.

Opponents of Deukmejian’s plan to build a prison at the site near Boyle Heights celebrated with champagne, however. They hailed the announced sale as a defeat for the Republican governor and a victory for leaders of the nearby largely Latino community who oppose the project and complain that they too often have been shunted aside.

After two years of negotiations with the state, executives of Crown Coach International, which owns a nine-acre parcel on the proposed prison site, disclosed to The Times on Tuesday that they had finalized an agreement to sell the land to Ramser Development Co.

The new owners, who plan to build an industrial complex on the site, are not interested in selling the property to the state for use as a prison, said Scott Ramser, the firm’s senior managing partner.

Deukmejian Administration officials made it clear that the governor, taken by surprise by the sale, is prepared to fight, although he has not decided on what strategy to pursue. “There was a lot invested in that site in terms of taxpayers’ dollars,” Thomas said.

Choosing another site would take at least a year, Thomas said. Both he and Merksamer indicated that Deukmejian is not prepared to wait that long because of severe overcrowding in the prison system. They said the governor is examining “a number of options” that they refused to discuss. “I mean options relating directly to Crown Coach,” Merksamer told reporters.

Both aides complained that, under current law, two nearly completed prisons that have been ready for weeks to receive some inmates cannot be opened until a new prison site is selected in Los Angeles County.

Merksamer noted that the Crown Coach-Ramser deal is not expected to be complete until the close of a 90-day escrow. “Anything can happen after 90 days, too,” he added.

Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Los Angeles), a foe of the so-called downtown prison, indicated, however, that the state Department of Corrections ought to begin to find a more suitable site for a prison. Roberti favors locating a prison in an unspecified northern section of the county where most voters are Republicans. The area surrounding the Crown Coach location is heavily Democratic.

He and other legislative critics of the Deukmejian prison proposal said they see the announcement of the sale of the property as a victory for local residents. They will “start out with a happy New Year,” Roberti said.

Even one of Deukmejian’s key allies on the prison issue, Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), conceded that the sale of the property to developers probably would mean an end to plans to build a prison there.

The sale, a discouraged Presley said, “over-complicates an already complicated problem. That was one of the reasons we tried to move so fast. . . . We argued that we ran the risk of losing the property. Now what we said could happen has happened.”

In theory, the property could be condemned and taken over by the state, but Presley said he thinks that process would take too long to help with the opening of the two new prisons, a 400-bed women’s prison in Stockton and a 2,200-bed men’s prison in San Diego.

Presley said he and Roberti had been close to an agreement on legislation that would have required reviews of a prison site in rural Los Angeles County as well as the Crown Coach site.

A jubilant Assemblywoman Gloria Molina, a Democratic candidate for the Los Angeles City Council, held a press conference at her East Los Angeles office with other opponents of the prison and declared the sale a victory that “demonstrates that we’re a community that needs to be respected. . . .”

‘Time to Say No’

Mary Lou Trevis, a teacher who lives in Boyle Heights, was one of many who said she was happily stunned that the two-year fight against the prison appeared to come to an end so suddenly. The prison protest, she and others said, tapped a long-seething resentment among local Latino residents who believed that they had been cleared out of Chavez Ravine for Dodger Stadium, moved aside for freeways and stepped over in the decision about the Los Angeles prison.

“They have to realize our community has become organized, we are not going to just shut up and take it anymore,” Trevis said. “I’ve lived here all my life, and all I’ve seen is that any time another area didn’t want a project, they’d put it here.”

Ernestina Garcia, a grandmother who has lived in the community 23 years, sat in a folding chair and watched others pop champagne corks. “I never protested before,” she said. “Our children work hard; they deserve better. Time to say no, no more.”

The Crown Coach site was not the original site selected by the Department of Corrections. In 1984, the department announced that 500 acres of desert land near Lancaster would be the future home of a state prison in Los Angeles County.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents the Lancaster area and was then chairman of the state Republican Party, objected strongly to the rural site, saying it was too far from transportation, utilities and other public facilities needed for a prison.

Alternatives Sought

The site was eventually scrapped by the department because of its proximity to flight patterns at nearby Edwards Air Force Base, department officials said. Antonovich, in the meantime, asked a real estate firm to come up with alternatives. One was Crown Coach, a site that owners decided to sell about the time that Antonovich decided to fight the proposed Lancaster site.

In 1985, state correctional officials chose the Crown Coach site as ideal for the Los Angeles County prison, although they had previously rejected the location as too small. Tom Crofoot of the Department of Corrections said its central location close to courts made it most suitable.

Molina objected and pushed consideration of building a state prison in Castaic, near the Los Angeles County-run Peter J. Pitchess Honor Ranch. Mayor Tom Bradley, initially critical of the Crown Coach site and about to announce that he would run against Deukmejian for governor, suggested that the prison be located on city-owned land in Saugus, near the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park.

Both potential sites are in Antonovich’s district. Antonovich and other local lawmakers objected to both, citing such environmental problems as flood plains and quake faults in addition to objections from local residents.

Staunch Support

The governor staunchly supported the Crown Coach site. The site was once owned by Jack L. Courtemanche, a former top Republican official, and was sold to Llewellyn Werner, a former official who worked for former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr., and Richard J. Nathan, a Southern California businessman, according to property records. Some Democratic officials had called for an investigation into possible connections between the property owners and the Deukmejian Administration.

In a letter to the governor Wednesday, Antonovich urged Deukmejian to continue efforts to acquire the Crown Coach site from the new owners. “In the event that no friendly sale can be arranged, I then urge that steps be taken to acquire the property through eminent domain,” Antonovich wrote.