NEWS

April 15, 2010
Deal is at hand

An "agreement in principle" has been struck between local officials on one side and the federal prison receiver and state corrections officials on the other over construction of a massive prison hospital immediately southeast of Stockton.

The deal is not done. The final wording of the tentative pact has yet to be worked out. It has to be approved by all concerned - Stockton, San Joaquin County, the Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce, federal receiver J. Clark Kelso, and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

A hiccup could delay things. Still, it looks like months of public rancor and hand-wringing will end with a deal. Not one that everyone likes. Not one that addresses every concern. Certainly not one that moves San Joaquin County contractors, businesses and workers to the front of the line for the construction, business and jobs that are coming.

But a deal that demonstrates that when enough pressure is brought on the state, it can be forced not just to listen to local concerns but to address them.

The main focus, of course, was on state plans for a 1,722-bed prison hospital on the site of the closed Karl Holton Youth Correctional Facility. This $895 million hospital will be the first of three prison facilities in the area of Highway 99 and Arch Road. Also planned are a mental health facility and a prisoner re-entry facility.

State officials, facing a federal court deadline of Dec. 31, 2013, to open the hospital, are trying to upgrade inmate health care after a federal court in San Francisco determined prisoner medical care is constitutionally inadequate. At first, Kelso proposed a series of hospitals, but eventually that was pared down to one massive facility, to be called the California Medical Facility, Stockton.

The state owns land on which prisons have operated in the past, and it only makes sense that property be used.

But local officials, feeling they were being steamrolled by state officials and the receiver, went to court not to block the project but to ensure at least some mitigations were in place before construction began.

It's the tentative settlement of that suit that came Friday, a deadline imposed by Kelso and state officials on the implicit, if hollow, threat that the project would go elsewhere and with it thousands of construction jobs, hundreds of permanent jobs and millions of dollars of potential annual business for San Joaquin County vendors.

That suit - sparked by concerns from the chamber of commerce and led throughout by chamber officials - forced state officials to listen to and act on local concerns. To bring that much pressure to bear on a huge bureaucracy such as the Corrections Department and the federal receiver and to win concessions is no small feat. The result is in marked contrast, for example, to the railroad job under way to build a peripheral canal around the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to convey more water south. In that case, Sacramento, working with south Valley farming interests and south state water districts, is simply ignoring concerns of Delta region residents.

We wish the prison hospital agreement were perfect. It's not, not for either side. A negotiated settlement never is. What is important is that negotiators never let perfection become the enemy of good, in this case a settlement that appears good for all concerned.

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