EDITORIAL : AVOID ENVIRONMENTAL OVERKILL.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which has a $370 million jail that it can't afford to use, now is confronted with the possibility of being forced to spend $50 million for an unproductive hole in the ground.

That, under a worst-case scenario, is what it might cost to dig up and clean up hazardous materials - chemicals seized during drug raids - at the Pitchess Detention Center in Saugus. The chemicals were dumped illegally during the 1970s.

County officials, noting that there is no evidence that the chemicals pose an immediate threat to drinking-water supplies or anything else, are proposing a less-costly alternative to state regulators. They want to leave the chemicals in the ground and reroute the drainage to reduce the risk of ground-water contamination. Total cost: $2 million initially and $1.4 million over 10 years for monitoring.

Clean-up programs tend to be inordinately expensive, often because regulators demand gold-plated solutions when less-costly remedies would do the trick. We hope that they will be more reasonable in this instance.