Gates to Explore Business Possibilities

Sheriff Brad Gates took his wife, Dee Dee, and two grown children to lunch Thursday after announcing that he won’t seek reelection next year to the job he has held for 23 years.

Based on what he had said half an hour earlier, that’s about as much planning as he has made since deciding to leave the Orange County Sheriff’s Department when his term expires at the end of 1998. By then, he will have worked there for 37 years.

He kept the decision so quiet that even his heir apparent, Assistant Sheriff Douglas D. Storm, didn’t know until a week ago.

Gates said that he wants to explore unidentified “business opportunities in the private sector” but that he has no idea what they might be. He said his focus for the next year will be completing unfinished business at the Sheriff’s Department, including the county’s jail construction program at the Theo Lacy and James A. Musick branch jails.

He ruminated after the announcement about forming a “Reagan Club,” an organization of “good-government” supporters interested in returning to themes epitomized by former California governor and U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

“We need to encourage quality people to run for public roles, not [those] hopscotching around and just being politicians,” Gates said. “Good-government organizations in the past were not always about [partisan politics]. It wasn’t about that, it was about doing what was right.”

The remark was an oblique reference to sheriff’s candidate and Marshal Michael S. Carona, who Gates’ supporters believe is being promoted by ambitious conservative GOP activists and lawmakers eyeing Carona’s road to higher office.

Speculation abounded this week about what Gates might do after leaving county service. Larry Thomas, spokesman for the Irvine Co., said there was no truth to a rumor that Gates was planning to work there.

Irvine Co. executive Gary Hunt said Gates has several strengths to bring to private employment.

“He has a tremendous record in law enforcement and the question becomes, how do you translate that into the private sector, if that’s where he chooses to go,” Hunt said. “Who knows? The head of a multinational corporation for security operations. A consulting specialist in law enforcement to myriad sources. The bottom line is that whatever he chooses to do, he’ll be very good at it and whoever gets him will be very lucky to have him.”

As the county’s most highly visible elected chief executive, Gates has crisscrossed the state and made friends with business and government leaders from rural county sheriffs to Gov. Pete Wilson.

Friends and colleagues said Gates may not know exactly what he’ll be doing, but his options are essentially unlimited.

“We play tennis together virtually every week. If he knows what he’s going to do, he hasn’t said a word,” said William Popejoy, the former county executive officer from Newport Beach who now heads the California Lottery in Sacramento.

“I think he feels comfortable making a decision on its own merits, not because he has something waiting in the wings,” Popejoy said. “Brad’s an administrator, and a damn good one. He’s a motivator. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t have a number of offers now that he’s made his decision. . . . He’s got that aura of, ‘I’m proud of my life and I’m ready to move on.’ He’s young enough to go on to something else.”

Wherever he lands, leaving county government will allow him to get away from the center of public life, spend more time with his family and earn even more than his $126,214 annual salary. Though Gates amassed a small fortune through real-estate investments in the 1980s, he lost much of that in the real-estate slump in the early 1990s.

The family’s horse stable, Creekside Equestrian Center in San Juan Capistrano, nearly drove the Gateses into bankruptcy several years ago. Their daughter, Deedee Jo, is barn manager there; son Scott is foreman.

One thing Gates said he won’t be doing is running for another political office. He was wooed by Wilson supporters in 1994 to run for the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor but turned them down.

“I don’t see any future for me in any other political office,” he said. “It’s not the kind of thing my family and I thought was right for us.”

Dee Dee Gates called the decision for him to step down “a good thing for us” but said it came with mixed emotions. The Sheriff’s Department is “his baby,” she said.

“Part of it is timing,” Dee Dee Gates said. “Everyone reaches that point in life where you start thinking about where to go next. We were not able to spend a lot of time together as a family. Now that the kids are older, we want to spend more time together doing things.”

She said she wasn’t worried about her husband’s ability to find another job or find happiness doing something else.

“He’s very confident and very good at what he does,” she said of her husband, who she said is more of a “homebody” than she is. “I think he would enjoy the challenge of going and homesteading someplace . . . starting from nothing and building a ranch from the ground up. I’m behind him 100% whatever he chooses to do.”