By Timm Herdt
Ventura County Star
SACRAMENTO — Acknowledging the state’s severe fiscal crisis, federal prison healthcare receiver J. Clark Kelso on Friday submitted two pared-down construction proposals to the court - including one that would eliminate Camarillo from consideration as a site for one of the proposed prison healthcare facilities.
Kelso is asking the courts to conduct hearings to solicit opinions from state officials and attorneys representing California inmates on three plans to construct facilities designed to bring healthcare services in the state prison system up to constitutional standards.
Last year, Kelso proposed a $6 billion construction plan to build seven stand-alone healthcare facilities that would create a total of 10,000 beds to treat inmates with chronic medical and mental illnesses.
That proposal has drawn increasing criticism in recent weeks, spawning a legal motion by Attorney General Jerry Brown to disband the receivership and provoking Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to complain Kelso was insensitive to the state’s enormous fiscal challenges.
One of the options Kelso is proposing is to stick with the current plan; another would eliminate about half the mental health care beds, reduce the number of facilities to five and lower the cost to $4.3 billion; the third option is to build three new facilities at a cost of $2.5 billion, creating 5,000 beds that would be exclusively devoted to medical treatment.
If a decision is made to pursue the least expensive option, Kelso said the three facilities would likely be built at three of the four sites that are farthest along in the planning and environmental review process - Stockton, Folsom, San Diego and Vacaville.
Selection of that option, Kelso said, would make it “very unlikely” his office would pursue construction at Camarillo or Chino.
All seven of the sites are on property owned by the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The Camarillo property under consideration is the grounds of the existing Ventura Youth Correctional Facility.
“Our intention is to simply put this issue before the public and the courts and see what the reactions are,” Kelso said. “We’re trying to present the best available options to the state, the plaintiffs and the court.”
He said the less expensive options are intended to be sensitive to the state fiscal challenge of closing a $40 billion budget shortfall between now and July 1, 2010. “I realize the state has a problem that’s much bigger than this problem,” he said.
Matthew Cate, secretary of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said he is encouraged that Kelso has committed to working with department experts “to improve his plans,” but the agency still believes the time has come for the court to abolish the receivership and return responsibility for medical care to state prison officials.
Opponents of the Ventura County proposal cheered Kelso’s suggestion of a less expensive alternative that would exclude the Camarillo site.
“The enormous number of people in this community who have always thought Camarillo was not an appropriate site would applaud Mr. Kelso’s revision of the plans,” said David Maron of Camarillo, spokesman for the Prison Hospital Action Committee.
“It makes sense that he has to go back to the drawing board given the input he’s received from the community and state officials.”
Assemblywoman Audra Strickland, R-Moorpark, called the action “good news.”
“It’s been my effort all along to let Mr. Kelso know that Ventura County is not the right place for a maximum-security prison,” she said.
Strickland said she would prefer construction plans be scrapped completely, in favor of improving medical treatment at existing prisons.
A review of the new options could be a complex process, because any change in plans would affect two court cases overseen by separate federal judges.
For more than a decade, mental health services at state prisons have been under the direction of a court-appointed special master who answers to Federal District Court Judge Lawrence Karlton of Sacramento.
Responsibility for medical care in prisons is under the direct control of Kelso, who is an agent of Federal District Court Judge Thelton Henderson of San Francisco.
Kelso stressed his exclusive concern is medical care, but that in 2007 he added mental health services to his construction plans at the request of the Schwarzenegger administration as a means to deal with both issues.
Because a high percentage of mental health patients would require intensive treatment, Kelso noted that eliminating mental health services from the facilities would markedly reduce operational costs.
The current plan, with a 50-50 split between medical and mental health beds, would have annual operational costs of $138,000 per inmate. The medical-only plan could be carried out at a cost of $96,000 per inmate.
Copyright 2009 Ventura County Star