Rule on Names May Be Bent for Gates

Brad Gates is still alive, but Orange County supervisors are poised to grant the former sheriff an honor they have reserved for the dead.

Two supervisors are asking their colleagues to allow Gates’ name to be emblazoned on a Sheriff’s Department building as a tribute to his 24 years of service as the county’s top cop.

The Board of Supervisors will decide at its meeting today whether to add the retired sheriff’s name to the forensic science center in Santa Ana, which houses the department’s crime lab and some administrative offices.

But a policy adopted under public pressure during the height of the county’s historic bankruptcy is in the way. It forbids supervisors from naming government facilities after any living person who has served as an elected county official.

Supervisors Jim Silva and Charles V. Smith, who are spearheading the effort to honor Gates, said the board should make an exception this time.

“Brad Gates was an exceptional leader in county government,” according to the agenda resolution signed by Silva and Smith. “Given the magnitude of his contribution [to the county], we believe this request should be considered as an exception to the policy.”

The resolution has been placed on the consent calendar, where such items frequently pass as a group without argument.

But a speedy passage is unlikely this time, Supervisor Cynthia Coad said. She said she is undecided about whether Gates deserves the honor and also has reservations about naming buildings after people who are still alive.

“It lends itself to abuses,” she said. “I think the general population is concerned that there might be undue pressure to allocate certain monies for naming facilities after people.”

Silva and Smith were unavailable for comment Monday.

In an interview Monday, Gates said the two supervisors mentioned their plans to honor him several months ago.

“I told them I didn’t come to be a sheriff to get one of these things,” said Gates, who was unaware the issue would go before the board today.

Naming county facilities after retired officials, and even officials still in office, was standard practice before 1995. Supervisors named the county’s minimum-security jail after former Sheriff James A. Musick just before his retirement in 1974. The board named an airport terminal in honor of one of its members, Thomas S. Riley, four years before his retirement in 1994.

A proposal to name another facility after Riley outraged many residents in January 1995 and triggered passage of the board’s current policy.

Residents furious about the county’s bankruptcy swarmed board meetings and condemned plans to name parks after Riley and another retired supervisor, Harriett M. Wieder, because of their role in the county’s financial crisis.

The residents “were ready to nail all the supervisors to the post,” County Clerk-Recorder Gary L. Granville said.

The board shelved the renaming and instead passed a resolution stating that future facilities be named in honor of public officials only after their deaths. The resolution acts as a statement of public policy but does not prevent the board from making exceptions, Granville said.

“I think it’s a nice gesture,” he said of Silva and Smith’s proposal. “He was an outstanding sheriff.”

The eight-story forensic science center, which was completed in 1992, houses investigators, the crime laboratory and the sheriff’s fiscal, property and records divisions, said Jim White, assistant director of the forensic science services division.

Gates’ lobbying for construction money was crucial to the creation of the state-of-the-art crime lab, White said. On the top floors of the building, as one example of the lab’s importance, technicians linked the notorious serial killer Gerald Parker to the murders of five Orange County women through DNA samples.

“It was his support that made it happen,” White said about Gates.