San Quentin: Cash-Strapped California to Spend $356M to Upgrade Death Row

Oct. 1, 2010— -- California's most hardened criminals and vicious murderers will be getting new death row digs, courtesy of a controversial renovation project with a price tag that's got some in the financially beleaguered state crying foul.

State officials justified the $356 million project by pointing out the security and safety flaws at the state's notorious San Quentin death row, which houses such high-profile murderers as Drew Peterson, Richard Ramirez and Cary Stayner.

But local and state officials questioned Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's commitment to pay a $64.7 million down payment out of the cash-strapped state's general fund, at a time when funding is being reduced or withheld from schools and state workers have been forced through a summer of furlough days.

"It is the poster child for this administration's failure to prioritize in tough times," state Assemblyman Jared Huffman, R-San Rafael, said. He has repeatedly dubbed the project California's "Cadillac Death Row."

"It's the most expensive prison cell space on the planet," he said.

Huffman is one of two state legislators to file a legal challenge to Schwarzenegger's use of veto power to excise from the budget language that would have called for studies and resolutions of the state's well-known prison overcrowding problem.

A decision is expected in November, but bids are scheduled to be opened on the project on Tuesday.

"I think a bidder would be crazy to extend any of the resources on this project because there is a huge legal cloud over it," Huffman said.

H.D. Palmer, the state's deputy finance director, said that the death row is in dire need of immediate attention and that because the state's penal code dictates executions be done at San Quentin, they cannot even consider moving death row elsewhere.

"Given the safety issues and the structural issues that are involved here, and given the fact that capital punishment is still the law of the land here … this facility needs to go forward," Palmer said.

Various state-calculated scenarios could add between $260 million and $450 million in interest to the final cost of the project.