Gates’ Backers May Buy Ranch for Training Use

Sheriff Brad Gates’ hopes to build a training center for narcotics officers at remote Rancho del Rio--apparently dashed last month when the Board of Supervisors voted to sell the property--may not be dead just yet.

The Sheriff’s Advisory Council, a nonprofit organization of about 600 friends and supporters of Gates, is trying to come up with enough money to buy the 213-acre South County property, a member of the council’s board said Tuesday.

“We’re trying to find some method whereby the advisory council can make this available to the sheriff for international narcotics training,” said Donald Burns, a past president of the advisory council and chairman of a committee that has worked on the proposal for the drug-training facility.

Burns, a Newport Beach businessman, said he did not know, however, exactly where the council’s efforts to find the several million dollars needed to purchase the ranch stood.

“A lot of people are pretty incensed at what happened,” said Burns, referring to the board’s decision to rezone the land and sell it, with the proceeds going to help pay the sheriff’s ever-increasing budget. “The county is just not thinking, in my estimation.”

While the land, confiscated in a 1985 drug raid, has been valued at about $2 million, developers say that it could be worth several times that amount with proper entitlements and water and road improvements.

Gates said he could not comment on any possible advisory council proposals. “I’m not at liberty to talk about anything at this point,” he said.

Advisory council president Clint Hoose said he was not aware of the training facility committee’s most recent effort.

“I haven’t seen a proposal,” Hoose said. “But we have a subcommittee that is working on this project. . . . The Sheriff’s Advisory Council has always stood ready to support that project and go into the private sector to raise the funds if that was deemed necessary.”

The council raised about $500,000 in cash and in-kind contributions to build the Sheriff’s Department’s Laser Village training facility in Orange. That was its largest fund-raising effort for a single project, Hoose said.

Gates’ proposal for an international drug training center includes several phases of development totaling about $26 million. A grant request for that amount to build and operate the center has been forwarded to the White House by the staff of Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.).