No Gambler, Popejoy Ready to Let It Ride

He doesn’t like gambling. The only time he purchased Lotto tickets was a couple of years ago as a joke for his wife’s birthday.

But William J. Popejoy said he’s looking forward to getting started Monday as director of the California State Lottery. He was appointed Tuesday to the post by Gov. Pete Wilson subject to Senate confirmation, which is not expected to be a problem.

Popejoy, who served a tumultuous five-month stint in 1995 as county executive officer in the wake of the county’s bankruptcy, replaces Mary Ann Gilliard, the lottery’s interim director who is leaving for an as-yet-unnamed position in the Wilson administration.

“When they first talked to me about it, the idea of spending time in Sacramento wasn’t very interesting,” Popejoy, 59, said Tuesday. “But I’ve been less than fully occupied and the things I’ve been looking at [to do] didn’t seem to be worth it. I’ve been playing a lot of tennis and doing a lot of housework.”

Wilson said it was the need for skillful management and the ability to make tough decisions that led him to Popejoy, a turnaround specialist for troubled businesses who guided American Savings & Loan during the depths of the S & L crisis. Popejoy is the fifth director to be named from outside the lottery industry.

“He embodies the strong leadership, unique perspective and public- and private-sector experience necessary to run the Lottery,” Wilson said in a statement. “I’m pleased he has agreed to accept this important challenge.”

Gilliard, a former prosecutor who held the job for 11 months, said Popejoy’s knowledge of financial institutions and blunt-speaking style will serve him well as head of the state’s $2.3-billion-a-year operation--a larger budget than the American Red Cross.

“You’re always in a very, very difficult position in the lottery because it’s gambling, and controversy will always surround it,” Gilliard said. “My advice to Bill is to call it as he sees it. He’s an honest, honorable person. From the get-go, he’s on real solid ground.”

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Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer said his impressions of Popejoy are “generally positive.”

“I worked with him during the Orange County bankruptcy and he seemed very capable,” Lockyer said from Washington, D.C.

Former Orange County Supervisor Bruce Nestande, now a private transportation consultant, said Popejoy has faced tough tasks before--and political fallout. He was soundly criticized after the bankruptcy by anti-tax groups for backing a half-cent sales-tax increase to pay off the county’s $1.64-billion debt. He resigned shortly after the measure was roundly defeated at the polls.

“His problem in Orange County was putting a tax measure on the ballot, but he did bring order to the [post-bankruptcy] process,” Nestande said. “He’ll only be working for one person now and that’s the governor. It’s not in his personality to try to build consensus. He’s a take-charge person and that’s the kind of person you need in a government bureaucracy.”

Popejoy said he became close to people in the governor’s office in the wake of the bankruptcy. After returning to private business in July 1995--he and his wife, Nancy, own Pac Pro Manufacturing, a custom packaging business in Santa Fe Springs--Wilson’s office called him “from time to time” to ask his opinion about appointments to other political posts.

The idea of his taking over at the Lottery came “out of the blue,” he said, mostly because he doesn’t even play Lotto.

“I walk into a casino and I say, ‘Oh boy, get me out of here,’ ” he said. “But I don’t know that it’s my place to express a judgment on something like that. The people of California voted for the lottery. If I had a philosophical problem with it, I wouldn’t take the job. And if you’re going to be involved in gambling, it’s the best way to do it because the money goes for a good cause.”

About one-third of lottery proceeds is split among the state’s schools.

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Popejoy confidant Paul Nussbaum, a Wells Fargo executive who worked with Popejoy during his American Savings and county stints, said his friend is “pumped up” about the new job.

“He has this crisis adrenaline that he feeds off of,” Nussbaum said.

If there was some hesitation to cracking another controversial assignment, it didn’t last long.

“When the governor of the state of California asks you as a private-sector entrepreneur to help him in a problem, public-sector situation, how do you say no?” Nussbaum said. “There’s a sense that the Lottery hasn’t achieved the potential the public and the governor thought that it could as far as contributing to education.”

Sheriff Brad Gates said Popejoy’s idea of helping increase funding to schools was probably the determining factor in his friend taking the job. Popejoy is a director of Gates’ Drug Use Is Life Abuse program and is co-chair for the 1997 AIDS Walk benefiting the AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County.

“I think all of us would want the citizens of California to have such a qualified leader for the lottery,” Gates said.