Carona Puts His Campaign Challenger on Leave

One day after winning reelection in an incendiary campaign battle against one of his lieutenants, Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona placed that lieutenant on paid administrative leave.

Carona declined to comment on Lt. William Hunt’s fate, saying it was a personnel matter. But he praised Hunt’s pledge to put the heated campaign aside. Carona also vowed to heal the department torn by scandal and politics.

Hunt, who got about half as many votes as his boss, said he was due back Wednesday after taking a month off to campaign, and was caught off-guard by the action.

“The only reason I was given was that there were open investigations regarding election activities,” Hunt said from his home in San Clemente. He has headed the sheriff’s operations in that south Orange County city.

“I was prepped for anything,” he said of possible consequences from his election loss. “You step into something like this and there are likely to be consequences. But I had as much right to run for the job as he did. I have no regrets.”

The sheriff needed a majority of the vote to avoid a November runoff. He received 50.9% of the vote with about 24,000 ballots to be counted, including absentee ballots received on election day and those cast by voters whose registrations must be verified. Hunt received 26.5% of the vote; two other candidates trailed.

Confident the numbers would hold, Carona met with county police chiefs Wednesday and then with his command staff for a “what-next summit.”

There will then be meetings with the Assn. of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs, which endorsed Hunt, and the Orange County Employees Assn., which represents the bulk of department employees.

A joint labor-management committee that was created by Carona to deal with personnel issues had suffered during the campaign, he said, because of dueling loyalties.

“Things have been tenuous because of politics,” he said. “Some of this is going to be ... that we as a department need to change some things, that there might be a need for some management adjustments or adjustments just in people’s minds.”

He said the internal rift and attacks from Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Ralph Martin, who got 17% of the vote, cast a pall over his attempts to lead the department in recent months. Rank and file deputies endorsed Hunt, though their union leadership favored Carona.

A third challenger, retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Robert Alcaraz, dropped out of the race last month and endorsed Hunt; his name remained on the ballot and got 5.5% of the vote.

“From a political perspective, every time I asked what do we need to do to move the organization forward, to heal this, somehow it got spun off as a question of whether it was a political move or whether I really wanted to do it for the department,” Carona said Wednesday.

“Now we don’t have a campaign, so there are no politics,” he said. “We can focus on what we need to do.”

Despite the apparent election win, Carona faces questions regarding some of his own campaign activities and actions by one of his former assistant sheriffs.

The state attorney general is investigating allegations that Carona sexually harassed two women and that he improperly billed his election committee $130,000 in expenses.

Additionally, former Asst. Sheriff George Jaramillo -- the sheriff’s campaign manager and confidant before being fired by Carona in 2004 -- faces trial later this year on bribery and other criminal charges.

The sheriff said he doesn’t expect the trial to disrupt the department’s operations. He also praised Hunt for vowing to help ease ill will lingering from the campaign.

Hunt’s administrative leave comes with political precedent.

The day after Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas defeated one of his deputies in March 2002, he demoted the deputy and six other prosecutors who opposed him. The attorneys were moved to the district attorney’s family support division, which four months later was taken over by the state.

Six of the seven lawyers sued, alleging that Rackauckas improperly retaliated against them.

Some of them prevailed and got their jobs back, including election challenger Deputy Dist. Atty. Wally Wade.

But Carona supporters said they didn’t anticipate much fallout from the election.

“The sheriff has one job and one job only, and that’s to protect the people of Orange County,” said pollster Adam Probolsky of Costa Mesa, who volunteered for Carona’s campaign.

“He’s got a certain management style and you can criticize what he’s done,” Probolsky said, “but at the end of the day, that management style has kept Orange County safe.”