LOCK ’EM UP: Tuesday’s budget-busting spit fest between the county supervisors and Sheriff Bill Brown over Brown’s proposed new North County Jail conjured the ghost of the late, great Everett McKinley Dirksen, former Republican Senate leader and icon, who famously opined, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”
Dirksen — who spent 36 years representing Illinois as a flip-flopping, pragmatic deal maker — was better known as the “Wizard of Ooze” due to his oleaginous voice and theatrical oratorical style. Any such stylistic mojo was conspicuously absent this Tuesday as the county supes — grim and squinty eyed with undisguised skepticism — peppered Brown’s brigade of bean counters with every possible question except the most important one.
The stakes could not be higher. On the table is the biggest, most expensive public works contract short of the Highway 101 freeway widening. Everyone agrees that the existing county jail on Calle Real is a festering rathole, not-so-quietly crumbling in on itself. For Brown — and every sheriff since 1973 — the construction of a new jail in North County has beckoned as both Holy Grail and Moby Dick. To date, no sheriff other than Brown has gotten within harpoon range. Later this month, bid packages are slated to go out. But after such literary allusions are stripped from Brown’s cosmic quest, the question remains who will get soaked the most.