Tehachapi News

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The planned 2,200-bed expansion of the California Correctional Institution in Cummings Valley has been reduced in priority and may never happen, according to reports trickling out of Sacramento.

Resistance to the expansion by residents of the Tehachapi area and tumbling state finances apparently merged to force a change in plans.

The fate of the proposed 110-acre freestanding facility is expected to be thrashed out at a special Assembly budget session scheduled to begin last week.

“The EIR (Environmental Impact Report) is continuing,” said CCI spokesman Brian Parriott on Nov. 5. “The decision [to proceed with the construction] hinges on what happens in the special session.”

Tehachapi City Councilman Ed Grimes said, “They heard our voice. There were many people who were concerned.”

City Manager Greg Garrett said that Chuck Stevens, project manager for the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, told him that CCI has been dropped off the first phase of the state-wide prison expansion.

Area residents reacted with passion when the state brought forth the expansion proposal, citing increased traffic, water consumption and quality and an impact on the schools by families of new correctional officers and prisoners' families.

“There was some concern within the city,” Garrett said. “We asked questions of the state - 'What are you going to do and how are you going to get there?' Other communities didn't express concern. They embraced expansion. We weren't for it or against it. We just wanted to understand.”

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, he said, would rather not do battle with the community and has decided instead to expand prisons in other more receptive cities, among them Delano and Wasco.

“You don't want to go into a community that is going to fight you all the way,” Garrett said.

The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation had never presented the project as a done deal, Garrett said, and CCI had been on “the short list” for construction.
The California Assembly authorized a major 16,000-bed statewide prison expansion in 2007 by passing Assembly Bill 900, but at the same time did not lock in a funding mechanism - and the state's current economic woes make that goal even more difficult.

In addition to prison bed expansion, the state is struggling to address remedies demanded in 2002 by a federal court in response to the largest prison class lawsuit ever - which put the whole system into Receivership -- to improve medical care for prisoners.

“There are problems with the Receivership issue,” said Grimes, who is president of the Association of California Cities Allied with Prisons and a member of the AB 900 Facilities Program Advisory Committee. “They are asking for $10 billion. Where are we going to get that money?”

Grimes said, “Prison expansion [at CCI].is still on the drawing board but it has been pushed so low on the priority list that it will be a long time before it happens, if it happens at all.”

Aside from the community resistance, there's the money.

Seth Unger, press secretary for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said the construction can go forward only if a sale of bonds is authorized.

“The state needs legislative or legal authorization before the Attorney General can go forward and issue a clean bond opinion to allow for the sale of bonds to pay for the construction projects authorized by AB 900,” Unger said in a statement to the Tehachapi News. “This is expected to be one of the issues that will be discussed in the special budget session that will be convened this week in the Capitol.”

At the Nov. 3 Tehachapi City Council meeting, Mayor Deborah Hand made a brief reference to the possible halt of the expansion plans  -- a scenario that has both positive and negative ramifications for the Tehachapi area.

The expansion as planned would have brought 800 new employees to the prison, which - although it is 11 miles away -- the city of Tehachapi annexed in 1998. The expansion would increase in prison population by 2,200 - to a total of 8,358 - that would bring mitigation fees of $800 per inmate to the area.

“Four hundred of that goes to the schools,” Grimes said. “The other $400 is divided evenly between the county and the city.”

Kern County, Grimes said, receives the money from the state and is responsible for doling it out to the city. 

“It goes into their general fund and it has a tendency to get lost,” he said.

Grimes said he has another meeting of the Association of California Cities Allied with Prisons Nov. 10, and intends to represent the wishes expressed by the people of the Tehachapi area.

“We can't let up on this,” Grimes said. “We need to be vigilant. In terms of not wanting expansion, we've done our fair share. There are 6,000 inmates up here. The community has good relations with the prison and we need to keep it that way.”

The waste treatment plant now under construction at the prison -- which is designed to meet the needs of the existing population and will provide irrigation water to local non-food growers -- is on schedule, Parriott said.

“Its finish is a year away,” he said. “Right now we have an extremely large hole in the ground.”