The population of inmates at Mule Creek State Prison continues to increase, putting even more pressure on an already overstrained sewage treatment plant at the facility.

Ione City Councilman Jerry Sherman told the Amador County Board of Supervisors last Tuesday that the population is continuing to climb. In the coming rainy season, he said, the prison cannot use the spray fields to dispose of their secondary treated wastewater, and the city's treatment plant will be unable to accept much of the flow because of its own problems with storage.

"It's going to go down the creek because they have no storage for it," Sherman said, adding, "We need to monitor those creeks."

The supervisors were told that the number of prisoners reached 4,019 last week, though the prison was designed for only 1,700.

Mule Creek Warden Rosanne Campbell said she was going to try to bring the prison population down, Sherman said, "but she has no control over how many people they bring there."

County Administrative Officer Pat Blacklock said Carlton Engineering, a consulting firm hired by the county, is continuing to gather more data and will collect additional ground water samples in an attempt to pinpoint the source of nitrates detected in a couple of private wells in the area.

Blacklock suggested that the county might band together with other counties such as Lassen that are also experiencing the pressure of prison expansion.

Supervisor Richard Forster said the only problem with working through the Regional Council of Rural Counties is that some of the counties where prisons are located are less interested in the increasing numbers of prisoners being shipped to them. They are primarily interested, he said, in mitigating the effects of those prisoners.

"We want both," Forster said.

In response to Forster's concerns, County Counsel John Hahn said that, "As far as moving to stop more inmates from coming to Mule Creek, I don't see how the county has standing to do that other than through the sanitation issue."

Hahn told Forster that the Regional Water Quality Control Board is the main regulator that can control the prison population, "unless this board wants to engage in litigation with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. And that would be protracted."

If contamination is clear from samples being taken, Forster said the county needs to seriously consider litigation.

Gene Riddle of Ione told the supervisors that if the Regional Water Quality Control Board issues the expected cease and desist order at their December meeting, Mule Creek State Prison "will have to stop taking prisoners."

He also asked Forster if other neighboring landowners had allowed their private wells to be tested for potential contamination. Forster replied that while one more had been tested, another landowner declined to have his well tested.

Jim Scully of Ione, who called himself "a very frustrated neighbor to Mule Creek and to the city of Ione," handed the supervisors each a thick sheaf of papers consisting of a contract that the county, the city of Ione and the Amador County Unified School District signed with the state Department of Corrections in 1985, as well as a 1994 ruling on that contract from an Amador County Superior Court judge.

In the contract, the state agrees that if the Department of Corrections builds a prison for 1,700 inmates, and allows it to house a population of up to 3,200 inmates with overcrowding, the county, city and school district would agree "not to file any action to stop construction of the prison other than an action based on breach or nonperformance of any duty set forth herein."

Originally, as noted in the contract, the prison was to be built for 1,200 beds.

The state apparently sought the contract because it wanted support from the city, county and school district to get special legislation to exempt the prison from review under the California Environmental Quality Act.

"The Department (of Corrections) shall timely carry out and implement completely all of the conditions and mitigation measures in the Amended Statement of Findings attached hereto," according to the contract.

In that Amended Statement of Findings, the state Department of Corrections agrees that it will "construct a new sewage treatment plant capable of treating effluent to secondary and tertiary levels of treatment."

Tertiary treated sewage is sewage that has been treated to a level adequate for discharge into creeks or use for irrigation without fear of contamination.

In 1994, according to the second document Scully presented to the Board of Supervisors, the city of Ione took the state to court for failure to live up to that contract in regards to the number and "level" of prisoners housed at the Mule Creek State Prison.

In a "tentative decision" signed by Superior Court Judge Horace Cecchettini, the judge held that by reclassifying one part of the prison from a Level III to a Level IV prison, and in exceeding the 3,200 inmate limitation, the state had violated the contract.

The contract, the judge said, "could hardly have been made clearer." The state's representations in the contract about the type of prisoners, the number of beds and the population, the judge said, "were, in fact, promises."

Judge Cecchettini ruled that the contract is valid and enforceable.

"This is a legal lever to bring the state to the table and negotiate for a tertiary plant," Scully told the supervisors. However, he said, "I understand there is reluctance from the city of Ione and Amador County to take this action."

Carefully couching his words to let the supervisors know that "This is not a threat," he said that his attorney had advised him that when the contract was signed, it committed the city, the county and the school district to guarantee those conditions were met.

"If it's not enforced, then these agencies failed as guardians and protectors and can become liable," Scully told the supervisors. "I am advising you there is a bear in the woods," he said. "You must become conscious of it."

However, Hahn advised the supervisors that they had no liability in the non-enforcement of the contract. "There is no bear in the woods," he said, adding that a tertiary treatment plant would only be required if the prison planned to dispose of treated effluent into surface water.

"It's going to be hard to enforce breach of a 20-year-old contract," Hahn told the supervisors, adding later that the question was not a matter of the age of the contract, but the age of the breaching of that contract.