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The Legislative Analyst's Office -- a nonpartisan agency that provides financial advice to the Legislature -- is seeking information from the administration about the project, including how it arrived at the price tag. State law allows departments to make minor capital improvements, such as repairs, without notifying the Legislature as long as the cost is less than $400,000, according to Brian Brown, who works on corrections issues for the analyst's office.
Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, called the secrecy of a project involving such a high-profile issue "insulting."
"Why not $399,999.99?" Leno asked facetiously. "The question is, was this price tag a coincidence?"
Seth Unger, media secretary for the Department of Corrections, said the department was under a tight timeline to make changes that didn't "allow the normal budget process."
"Our facilities managers were able to construct it for that amount of money, and so we chose to go with that process," Unger said. He noted the department intended to inform the Legislature of the project in an upcoming quarterly report that lists all minor construction projects.
Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, said the cost was "suspicious" and said he would demand that corrections officials explain the project at a public hearing.
Perata noted that two of his aides were at San Quentin earlier this month and were not shown the new building. He said the revelation about a new death chamber could slow negotiations between the governor and lawmakers on other prison issues.
"He is asking us for the authority to build $10 billion in new prison beds," Perata said about the governor's proposal to address prison overcrowding. "But if we can't trust them on something like this, why should we trust them at all?"
Huffman said he was particularly angry because he recently held a meeting with Tilton about a proposal to rebuild the Death Row at San Quentin, and Tilton did not mention the new execution chamber.
Tilton said Friday that he had not been aware during his meeting with Huffman that a new chamber was being built.
The Schwarzenegger administration has proposed a $337 million project that would build new cells for Death Row inmates, who are living in old, cramped quarters.
The project has been proposed for years and met with opposition in Marin County, where some local officials have called for closing the 155-year-old prison. The new Death Row proposal is 53 percent more expensive than one proposed in 2003, and a recent report by the Legislative Analyst's Office recommended that lawmakers reject the project.
"Why on earth would you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something when the whole Death Row project is in question and we're not sure our form of capital punishment will meet constitutional muster?" Huffman said.
The new chamber was built next to the famed lime-green structure that was a gas chamber until the state began using lethal injection in 1996.
Condemned inmates legally may choose whether to be executed by gas or lethal injection. Tilton said the new building was not set up as a gas chamber and that the department would keep the old structure.
While administration officials said in the memo initiating the project that they had been directed by the court to create a new execution chamber, there is no court order suggesting they do so. Fogel asked the administration to come up with proposed solutions, which he plans to review after they are submitted in May.
An attorney for Michael Morales, the Death Row inmate who sued the state over its use of lethal injection, said he was not aware of the administration's project and did not believe the governor had notified the court that it was building a new chamber.
The attorney, David Senior, noted that Schwarzenegger had requested an unusual court order that would have allowed the administration to keep its deliberations about revamping death penalty procedures under seal, which would have made it more difficult for defense lawyers or the media to obtain any documents related to the issue. The Chronicle and other news organizations argued against the court order, and Fogel agreed with them in a February ruling.
"The failure to disclose what they're doing and how they're doing it (at San Quentin) meets squarely with their refusal to provide transparency throughout this process," Senior said.
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