Assembly Committee Kills Bill on Coroner’s Role as Sheriff

A bill that Orange County officials had hoped would end, finally, the controversy over the dual role of the sheriff-coroner was killed in an Assembly committee Tuesday.

Assemblyman Richard Robinson (D-Garden Grove) marshaled the votes against the bill by Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), calling it a “political feud” between Ferguson and Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Brad Gates.

Seeking to eliminate the perceived conflict of interest involving jail deaths, Ferguson’s bill would have required that those deaths be investigated by the district attorney’s office and that the sheriff-coroner “cooperate.”

It was patterned after a policy adopted by the Orange County Board of Supervisors last May. But supervisors said that policy was backed only by a written agreement between Gates and Dist. Atty. Cecil Hicks.

Unless that “memorandum of understanding” is sustained by state law, supervisors said, a new sheriff-coroner elected in the future might defy it.

Trying to appease opponents and win support for his bill, Ferguson had made the bill even weaker than procedures already in effect in Orange County. The bill also would have affected only Orange County.

But Robinson had said he would oppose the bill unless he was convinced that all local opposition to it had been erased. On Tuesday, he said he had spoken recently to Orange County sheriff’s deputies who still had reservations about it.

Last year, Ferguson tried unsuccessfully to force separation of the offices in counties where one person holds both titles. That bill was killed last year in the Assembly Local Government Committee, the same panel that rejected Ferguson’s new bill Tuesday.

Sheriff-Coroner Gates, who vociferously opposed Ferguson’s bill last year, has avoided public comment on the one this year, which was supported by the Board of Supervisors.

All four Republican members of the committee voted for Ferguson’s bill, but Assemblyman Bruce Bronzan (D-Fresno) was the only Democrat to join them.

After the vote, Ferguson threatened Democrats who voted against the measure, saying that Robinson, who is running for Congress, “won’t be here much longer and my seniority is growing every day.”

Supervisor Bruce Nestande said Tuesday’s vote may revive the very controversy that supervisors were trying to put to rest.

“We are going to have people coming to us saying we ought to split the two offices,” Nestande predicted.