Showdown Due on Drug Ranch : Law enforcement: County supervisors are scheduled to vote Tuesday on the sheriff’s plan to turn Rancho del Rio into a narcotics training center for police officers.

Almost five years after it was seized in a drug raid, the fate of Rancho del Rio could finally be decided Tuesday, when the Orange County Board of Supervisors considers Sheriff Brad Gates’ proposal to build a regional narcotics training center on the 213-acre property.

Gates says the facility will help place the “domestic soldiers” in the war on drugs on an equal footing with highly sophisticated dealers. And, he says, he can pay for the facility with tuition, private donations and money seized in drug raids.

“This will cost the general fund absolutely no dollars,” Gates promised last week between meetings with county supervisors, whom he was lobbying for support.

But some of the supervisors are skeptical of the idea, citing more urgent needs for both the drug money and the estimated $2 million the sale of the ranch might bring. A county staff report says Gates’ funding plan for the training center is uncertain and recommends selling the property.

“The sheriff has a $4-million budget deficit, and I have to try to make it up,” said Supervisors’ Chairman Don R. Roth.

Roth also questioned why the Board of Supervisors has not been presented with alternative sites for a training facility, if one is so sorely needed. He suggested at least looking at using county-owned land at the James A. Musick honor farm near Irvine.

“I’m not saying I’m smarter than the sheriff,” he said. “But is it a higher priority than spending money on a remote jail? We have an extremely high priority to build more jail space . . . and I believe that ultimately (the training center) will cost money to bring up to standards.”

Gates, however, said the Musick land is used to grow crops for jail kitchens and that training undercover narcotics officers in close proximity to 1,000 inmates would cause serious security problems.

The California National Guard is also setting up a drug training center in San Luis Obispo, and some supervisors said they would like to know if Gates’ proposal could be incorporated into that plan.

The National Guard facility, however, is intended to help managers of law-enforcement agencies and the military coordinate their drug-fighting efforts, as opposed to the narcotics investigator who would be served at a Rancho del Rio training facility.

While Roth’s vote to sell the property appears certain, other supervisors were noncommittal last week.

Supervisor Roger R. Stanton said he was leaning toward selling Rancho del Rio, but he added that he was impressed by Gates’ presentation Friday morning and had not made up his mind for sure. “The issue is more complex than it originally appeared to be,” he said.

Similarly, Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez said he would hear Gates out on the proposal before making up his mind.

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley declined to comment on the matter, and Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder could not be reached.

Both Roth and Gates dismiss the notion that Tuesday’s vote is shaping up as a political showdown between the new board chairman and the popular sheriff who is expected to win his fifth term in November.

“The sheriff’s a friend of mine,” Roth said.

“I don’t get involved in personalities,” Gates said.

That may well be, but Roth’s goal to get the county budget in order and establish priorities in the sheriff’s wish-list could set him on a collision course with Gates.

Besides favoring the sale of Rancho del Rio, Roth has proposed building a regional, maximum-security jail in the Riverside County desert--a plan that Gates, who favors continuing with plans for a Gypsum Canyon jail, opposes. And Roth has talked about following the lead of other counties and states and privatizing at least part of the county jail system as another cost-cutting measure.

“He’s got the cowboy hat,” said Roth recently of Gates. “I’ve just got a few ideas about the budget.”

Legal Questions

Still unresolved is the question of whether the county can legally sell the land and use the proceeds to pay for the Sheriff’s Department’s budget overrun.

The U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles has sent a letter to the county saying that the land was deeded to the county with the understanding that it would be used for narcotics training, and that any money from its sale cannot be used to pay for items already in the law-enforcement budget. But a county counsel’s memo drafted in response to the letter said the county’s intended use for the money supplemented the departmental budget and therefore is legal.

The county report recommending the sale of Rancho del Rio--the language and details of which Gates haggled over with staff members until the last minute--says that while it would be nice to have a drug training facility in Orange County, law-enforcement officers can get that training elsewhere. The report adds that “more pressing and basic needs” dictate the sale of the ranch.

Law enforcement officials in Orange County and throughout the state, however, say that specialized narcotics training is not so easy to come by--and that the Rancho del Rio facility would enable them to tailor drug training to particular situations found in the county.

“There is a critical need for a regional training center for Orange County,” said Garden Grove Police Chief John Robertson, who headed a committee of police chiefs that studied Gates’ proposal. “It’s not that the current training is bad, but it’s limited . . . and someone else is setting the standards.”

All police officers receive a minimal number of hours of drug training at their academies--the police equivalent of boot camp. For the basic narcotics investigation course, however, most officers in Orange County must travel to the state Department of Justice’s Advanced Training Center in Sacramento--if they can get in.

The center offers an 80-hour course, which covers such topics as clandestine drug labs, search and surveillance and officer survival. The course is offered 10 times a year, with about 30 students per class, said Jack Beecham, chief of the center.

The waiting list to get into one of the classes is about a year, Beecham said. Other law-enforcement officials said the wait ranges from a few months to as long as 18 months.

“We are not meeting the need,” Beecham said.

Gary Miller, director of the police academy at Gavilan College in Gilroy near San Jose, said the shortage of specialized narcotics courses results in officers finding themselves in dangerous situations they may not be trained for.

“There are people in the job right now that haven’t been trained,” Miller said. “Not that they don’t know police work, but they haven’t had the specialized training . . . in topics like informant development . . . to deal with special problems.”

Gavilan College and the Orange County Sheriff’s Department were both recently approved by the state Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, which is trying to expand the list of providers, to teach the basic narcotics investigation course.

The Sheriff’s Department will begin offering the course, probably in the spring, regardless of whether the Rancho del Rio facility is approved, said Assistant Sheriff Walt Fath.

While portions of the narcotics class could be offered at the sheriff’s training academy in Garden Grove, some of the curriculum requires field training, for which Rancho del Rio is ideally suited, Fath and law-enforcement training providers say.

“We can set up the scenario and say, ‘This is a rock house,’ ” Fath said. “ ‘It’s fortified, booby-trapped--now, how are you going to get in there safely?’ ”

Other Courses

Donna J. Picard, dean of applied arts and sciences at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana, said field training at the campus has not always worked out so well. “We’ve done homicide scenarios here on campus,” Picard said. “Some students have come on to the scenarios and were quite upset. They thought it was real.”

The Sheriff’s Department is working on a curriculum of other courses, in addition to the basic narcotics investigation course, that it would like to offer at Rancho del Rio, Fath said.

Gates is asking the Board of Supervisors to give him at least one year to prove the regional training center’s value. While his initial development plans call for expenditures of $388,000 in the first year, future development phases would bring the construction cost to about $4.3 million and the annual operating cost to $2.9 million.

Fath said the Sheriff’s Advisory Council, a private group that has helped pay for Gates’ projects in the past, would likely step in and help cover any deficit for the drug training facility.

Gates has also submitted a far more expensive development plan to Sen. Pete Wilson’s office, which has forwarded the plan and a request for federal money to pay for it, to the White House.

That plan, which will probably not be considered for at least several months, calls for an international narcotics training center that would bring in drug experts from around the world. The price tag: $26 million.

“Sometimes we have to say no,” Supervisor Stanton said. “Whether we do in this case remains to be seen.”

PROPOSED REGIONAL DRUG-TRAINING FACILITY AT RANCHO DEL RIO

The Board of Supervisors is expected to vote Tuesday on Sheriff Brad Gates’ plan to begin development of a $4.3-million narcotics facility on a 21.3-acre ranch seized in a 1985 drug raid.

Source: Sheriff’s Department

RANCHO DEL RIO’S CHECKERED PAST

The following is a chronology of Orange County’s involvement with Rancho del Rio.

March 1, 1985: Drug agents, armed with search warrants, storm the ranch and seize $23,000 in cash and more than 50 weapons and make two arrests. The ranch’s owner, Daniel James Fowlie, is not there, but he is later arrested in Baja California and indicted on 26 felony counts of drug smuggling.

Jan. 4, 1988: The federal government hands over title to the 213-acre ranch to Orange County under the terms of a 1984 federal law that allows local police agencies to share in assets seized from suspected drug traffickers. The property is the largest ever transferred under the law.

April 25, 1989: President Bush travels to Rancho del Rio and delivers $4.39 million in seized drug assets to local police.

Sept. 6, 1989: A county auditor’s report reveals that the county spent $335,061 from the sheriff’s drug-fighting budget to pay for the Bush visit.

Jan. 24, 1989: County Administrative Officer Ernie Schneider signs off on a staff report recommending that Rancho del Rio be sold. The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to consider that recommendation Tuesday.