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On Tuesday morning, the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors voted 3-2, narrowly agreeing to send a letter of opposition to Assembly Bill 1608, a proposed piece of legislation that would force California counties to separate the offices of sheriff and coroner.

Humboldt is one of 48 out of 58 counties statewide in which the duties of the coroner are combined with those of the sheriff’s office. The bill’s authors, Assembly Democrats Mike Gipson and Dr. Akilah Weber, say the legislation is necessary to increase transparency and accountability.

“This bill would ensure that death investigations are conducted objectively, reducing any perception that the investigative process could be influenced by other segments of the criminal justice system,” Gipson said in a statement.

The bill was inspired in part by the 2020 death of Angelo Quinto, a 30-year-old Navy veteran who died in a hospital three days after an Antioch police officer knelt on his neck for five minutes. The Contra Costa Coroner’s division, which is part the county’s sheriff’s office, later ruled the death an accident, listing the cause as “excited delirium.”

First District Supervisor Rex Bohn brought the draft opposition letter to the board for consideration. The letter argues that maintaining the coroner and sheriff duties under a single elected official is “administratively and fiscally efficient for our rural county” and says the proposed bill “would create significant costs and remove the existing authority” of the board of supervisors. 

Humboldt County consolidated the offices of coroner/public administrator with the Sheriff’s Office in January of 2015, and Bohn said the move has likely saved the county money. 

“It has been beneficial to us,” he said. “We have not had any issues.”

He then added, “I do want to mention that the white Corvette comes up every once in a while.”

He was referring to the 1976 Corvette that belonged to the late Fred Hawkins, whose estate was administered by the Coroner/Public Administrator Bureau, another county division that was placed under the sheriff’s authority in 2015. The Corvette was sold to a sheriff’s deputy in violation of California Government Code Section 27443, which makes it a crime for deputies or their family members to purchase any belongings from an estate being administered by the public administrator.

A 2017 Outpost investigation into the county’s Coroner/Public Administrator Bureau found that these illegal insider sales had been happening for years, with deputies selling automobiles, electronics, furniture, a firearm and more to their fellow deputies and other county insiders, typically with minimal documentation and at prices well below market value.

When the corruption was uncovered, Sheriff Billy Honsal vowed to conduct a thorough internal investigation. District Attorney Maggie Fleming forwarded the case to the FBI and the California Attorney General’s Office, and the state agency agreed to take on the investigation. Its “thorough review” of the evidence was completed in November 2020, with the AG opting not to pursue charges. To date, no one with the Sheriff’s Office has been held publicly accountable, though in 2018 Honsal implemented a number of new procedures and anti-corruption policies. 

Bohn downplayed all this, referring only to the Corvette, which was among the belongings that Honsal ordered deputies to return during the initial investigation. Bohn said the vehicle was eventually sent to John’s Used Cars and Wreckers to be crushed because it was so run down the Public Administrator couldn’t manage to sell it.

“We’ve had a great working relationship, and I haven’t had any complaints on the coroner’s office in four or five years,” Bohn said.

Of course, the investigation into the county’s public administrator function doesn’t directly relate to AB 1608, which would only require the separation of county sheriff’s duties from those of the coroner, not the public administrator.

Bohn suggested that counties with smaller populations should maybe be exempt from such legislation, which he predicted will just create more bureaucracy.

“It would be expensive to set up a separate [coroner] entity,” he said. “That’s the savings we were looking for eight years ago.”

Fourth District Supervisor Virginia Bass said she remembered thoroughly examining the consolidation upon the retirement of former Coroner-Public Administrator Dave Parris. “And while, you know, there had been challenges as you said, I think that has been addressed and I think it’s operating really well.”

Third District Supervisor Mike Wilson offered a differing opinion, saying he doesn’t support the letter and likely wouldn’t support one supporting the bill either. He said he sees the value in transitioning coroner services away from sheriffs’ offices, and while he does have some anxiety about increasing costs, he believes coroner services could operate in much the same way under another department, such as the Department of Health and Human Services.

“I think the issue is the potential for conflict of interest,” Wilson said. But he also noted that the language of the bill will likely change a lot before it winds up on the desk of Governor Gavin Newsom, if it ever does.

Fifth District Supervisor Steve Madrone returned to the matter of the Public Administrator corruption investigations, saying he remembered that “the community was very concerned about the disposition of a number of assets,” not just the Corvette, and that the results of the sheriff’s internal investigation were never made public due to confidentiality clauses regarding personnel issues.

“So from a transparency perspective, I think that it would really be good to have these [offices] separated, because when an investigation happens and you can’t actually tell the public what was the outcome of that investigation, it leaves people not knowing and wondering, you know, what happened there,” Madrone said. “So for that reason, I really think that they ought to be separated, because of transparency.”

Lt. Sam Williams, who works in the Coroner/Public Administrator Bureau, told the board that the doctors who perform autopsies for the county are contract workers, not employees.

“I think that our doctors are as disconnected as they can be from the [cases behind the] autopsies that they’re conducting in order to provide an unbiased and transparent cause of death,” Williams said. 

Second District Supervisor Michelle Bushnell said she feels that local control is important, and she objected to the bill’s provision prohibiting county boards of supervisors from consolidating the two offices.

Regina Fuller, the deputy director of financial and support services with the Sheriff’s Office, tried to clear up some confusion by explaining that separating the coroner into its own division wouldn’t necessarily have any impact on the sheriff’s authority over the public administrator, which is an entirely separate function.

Bushnell asked for an estimate of the cost if the county were forced to separate the Coroner’s Office from the Sheriff’s Office. County Administrative Officer Elishia Hayes said that a “very rough estimate” based on conversations with Sheriff Honsal was “roughly $400,000.” Since all three divisions currently operate under one department head, separation would require appointing a new department head to oversee the coroner’s duties, she explained.

Madrone voiced skepticism about that cost estimate. 

“I don’t think it’s really fair to suggest that one person [who’s] doing three jobs within one position — and the cost for that position — is suddenly going to become three full-time positions,” he said. Madrone went on to add that most of his concerns lie with the public administrator duties, and he’d like to see that authority separated from the Sheriff’s Office.

He and Wilson voted against sending the letter, but Bass, Bushnell and Bohn formed a majority, approving the opposition letter, which will now be sent to the chairs of both the Senate Public Safety Committee and the Senate Governance and Finance Committee, along with the authors of the bill.