Face to Face : Gates Meets With Challengers for First Time

For the first time in his reelection campaign, Sheriff Brad Gates met face to face Thursday with the two candidates opposing him on the June 3 ballot, giving them a rare opportunity to confront him with their allegations.

But his opponents--Municipal Judge Bobby D. Youngblood and Sheriff’s Sgt. Linda Lea Calligan--came away from the taping of a KOCE-TV public television debate disappointed that Gates had refused to discuss their charges.

The debate is scheduled to air on a segment of “Jim Cooper’s Orange County Election ‘86,” which will be shown on Channel 50 at 8:30 p.m. May 16, and at 10 a.m. May 17.

During the show, Calligan accused Gates of covering up the drunk-driving arrests of two sheriff’s deputies and illegally owning an interest in an Irvine bar. Youngblood said Gates has become wealthy while on the public payroll. Both attacked his integrity and competence.

But Gates curtly dismissed the attacks, refusing to discuss the allegations. Instead, he talked about the need to step up the fight against illegal drugs, add more neighborhood watch programs and crack down on child molesters.

“I have more important things to talk about here than the untruthful allegations of my opponents,” Gates said. “I’m a cowboy. . . . When you walk through the barnyard, every once in a while you have to clean off your shoes. I deny them (the allegations) all. I’d like to talk about the issues.

“The issues we’re facing in this county are certainly additional jail facilities. It’s a very tough political issue to face by the Board of Supervisors and everybody in the system. Over the last 12 years we’ve been working to solve this problem.”

Calligan and Youngblood also wanted to discuss jail overcrowding, but they accused Gates of contributing to the problem rather than solving it.

Gates and the Board of Supervisors were held in contempt of court in 1985 by U.S. District Judge William P. Gray for failure to comply with a 7-year-old order to ease overcrowding at the main men’s jail. Gates said Thursday that he and the supervisors have been working “very diligently” since 1978 to ease the overcrowding.

Managerial Competence

But Calligan said Gates’ “managerial competence is in question (because) we have three jails already, and we’re now going to be building a fourth one. When that jail is ready, it will already be overcrowded.

“The sheriff, whoever that is, needs to take a leadership role. . . .”

Calligan and Youngblood agreed that one large jail in a remote area of the county is the best solution to the overcrowding. But Gates countered that a decision to build a remote jail is still under study.

“That environmental impact report will be done in a year,” he said. “My opponents should know that.”

Gates said the decision of where to locate jail facilities and how to pay for them “is not mine.”

No Debate

Early in the campaign, Gates said he had no intention of debating his opponents. Despite KOCE-TV billing the program as “Orange County’s only TV debates on issues and candidates,” Gates said he didn’t consider the format a debate.

Calligan, a 15-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department, repeated her accusations that Gates covered up the 1977 drunk-driving arrest of two sheriff’s deputies and in 1975 illegally owned an interest in an Irvine bar. But Calligan was dissatisfied with Gates’ responses, saying he essentially “declined to comment again.”

Orange County Superior Court Judge Judith M. Ryan ruled in April that the drunk-driving and bar ownership allegations were “false and misleading” and ordered them stricken from Calligan’s statement on the sample ballot, which has been mailed to voters. Calligan is attempting in federal court to force the county registrar’s office to mail a supplemental statement to voters that includes the expunged accusations.

Personal Fortune

Youngblood, who is on unpaid leave from the Municipal Court bench to conduct his campaign, charged that Gates “has proven he has neither the personal integrity nor the ability to be our sheriff.” To bolster his argument, Youngblood said Gates has “a personal fortune of several million dollars he’s amassed on a salary that averaged about $45,000 a year.”

Youngblood last month sent to the state Fair Political Practices Commission allegations that Gates has owned real estate “secretly through the years” and not properly reported his holdings on conflict of interest forms.

(A 1978 FBI investigation into Gates’ personal finances found no evidence to warrant prosecution.)

“I’ve been a hard-working family man like everybody else,” Gates said. “We have sacrificed and worked extremely hard, and I’m certainly not rich by any stretch of the imagination. But we have reached after 25 years of hard work a comfortable position. I’m just happy that God has kept me healthy and my family healthy, and we were able to . . . do what we did, and I’m proud of it.”

Youngblood Disappointed

Following the taping at KOCE-TV’s Golden West College studio, Youngblood said: “I’m just disappointed the sheriff wouldn’t comment on his personal finances.”

Gates, like 35 other county sheriffs in California, also serves as county coroner.

Youngblood and Calligan said Thursday the sheriff’s and coroner’s offices should be separate to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest when coroner’s deputies investigate deaths involving sheriff’s personnel.

They said an agreement reached last year between the Sheriff’s Department and the district attorney that will allow the prosecutor’s office to investigate deaths at the jail is inadequate to prevent that conflict of interest.

“We need an independent coroner, we need an independent agent whose job is to look into the deaths,” Youngblood said.

Gates, who has staunchly opposed separating the sheriff and coroner offices, defended the current system as “a very effective one.”