Curtis Hill announced this week he won’t run again
When Sheriff Curtis Hill joined the local department as a
22-year-old deputy in 1976, the office culture was much
different.
”
When I started, nobody wanted to hear anything you had to say
until you’d been here for five years,
”
Hill said.
Curtis Hill announced this week he won’t run again
When Sheriff Curtis Hill joined the local department as a 22-year-old deputy in 1976, the office culture was much different.
“When I started, nobody wanted to hear anything you had to say until you’d been here for five years,” Hill said.
That, he said, has changed.
Hill took time Tuesday to reflect on a career that will span nearly 35 years once his third and final term as sheriff ends about a year from now.
He announced this week that he will not run for reelection and instead will retire from law enforcement following more than three decades in the local office and a dozen years as the county’s elected sheriff.
The main change he has witnessed through the years, he said, has been what he touted as a significant increase in the quality of staff members in the office and a culture transformation allowing more open dialogue there.
Hill also spoke about challenges he has faced in balancing his home and professional life, his expectations to stay away from public office after retirement, and the saga that became of the Michael Rodrigues rape trial.
Hill and Rodrigues, who was a sergeant when fired in September 2007, spent 25 years in the office working together. The sheriff had declined to comment about Rodrigues during the investigation and trial, which ended in September with convictions on four counts and the ex-deputy getting a 60-years-to-life prison sentence.
Hill this week said he could not comment on details because there remains potential liability for the county.
“The bottom line is,” Hill did say, “people make personal decisions with their behavior. He made decisions. Unfortunately, they were the wrong decisions. Now he’s going to live with that.”
As for any difficulties the office may have faced during the process, Hill said the organization already had “moved well past that” by the time the trial came around.
“I’ve got a group of employees who never knew who he was,” he said. “They don’t even know who he is and they don’t care. Just speaking globally, when those things happen, those kinds of things are an embarrassment to law enforcement. Hopefully, he’ll be able to sit back and think about that. Because he is solely responsible for his behavior. No one else is responsible other than him.”
Advancements in professionalism
The current staff in particular is a point of pride for Hill, who believes the local office is well-positioned for the future. A higher level of professionalism exists today than ever before, he said.
“They’re so much smarter and work-oriented,” Hill said of the staff at the sheriff’s office, jail and dispatch center. “The work ethic and all those things are so much better than when I started.”
As their leader, Hill said through the years he has expressed a desire that staff members “tell me what I need to know and not what they think I want to hear.”
On several occasions, he referred to the culture at his career’s outset as a “walled fortress.” He said that started to change with former Sheriff Harvey Nyland, under which Hill served as undersheriff for 10 years before his election in 1998, while the office has seen much more representation at the state and federal level, he noted.
Hill sees a wide range of benefits to that involvement such as examining “best-case scenarios” and “best practices” in other organizations and then determining whether they might be feasible here.
He also believes he has succeeded at supplying the office with the best equipment and tools possible. He noted as one example how the office in the coming months will install broadband-capable laptops, which can gain access to important data on the roads, in three of the patrol cars as a transition toward increasing use of technology.
“I’ll stack our organization against any organization in the state as far as what we’re doing with our equipment,” he said.
Hill rules out politics for future
Although he believes the office has made some major strides in the past 12 years, Hill wants to spend more time with his family and working with nonprofit organizations in the community.
He said the “biggest challenge” over the years has been his ability to “pace myself to balance my professional career with my home life.” He noted how he has been sheriff during his 19-year-old son’s entire time in school and how his wife Ellen’s sacrifices have played a big role in his tenure.
“We’ve done a good job of balancing that between the two of us. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have been able to do this job. She knew I’m driven in this profession.”
He went on: “So there were a lot of sacrifices that she made to make sure there was some balance, and sometimes that balance was leaning more toward the work side than the home side.”
Despite his decision against running again, Hill called the sheriff position “the best job in the world.” As for any plans to run for another elected office or get directly back into law enforcement once he retires, Hill indicated he won’t be doing either.
“I absolutely have no plans, no interest, to run for any other public offices at all,” he said. “I’ve had a great run at sheriff. Any other public office doesn’t match up to being elected as sheriff.”
He said he had been asked about running for statewide office. “But I’m going to go back to the balance between my professional and personal life. That’s too much of an imbalance for me.”
He said he will stay dedicated to the job for the next 13 months and he noted how the state budget stands as the biggest challenge of the year. He also pointed out such major projects under way that will keep him busy such as the jail expansion and sheriff’s administration building expansion, and noted how he will be appointed as president of the state sheriff’s association in April.
Beyond his retirement, though, Hill said he plans to focus his time outside the home on two nonprofit organizations for which he volunteers, the YMCA of San Benito County and the San Benito County Saddle Horse Show Association.
“My wife and I are really excited,” he said. “And our son is 19 and he’s got plans for his future, so we don’t know where that’s going to take us, either.”
For a story on the process and filing deadlines for the open sheriff’s seat, along with who might be running, see the Hollister Free Lane on Tuesday.
