Departing Sheriff Jim Hart defiant over grand jury criticism and a non-elected successor, says worst of fentanyl crisis yet to come

When Sheriff Jim Hart announced last week that he’d step down at the end of the year, the news seemed abrupt but didn’t land as a total shock for Santa Cruz County. 

The Scotts Valley resident has spent 36 years in the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, and the past 10 as the county’s top cop (the longest reign for a sheriff since Mark Tracy’s between 1994 and 2004). Over those nearly four decades, the landscape law enforcement navigates has seen tectonic shifts. Hart was part of a narcotics team in the 1990s that busted Valerie and Mike Corral’s medical cannabis grow operation in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which helped spark a statewide legalization effort. When Hart took over the department in 2014, there was tension between the sheriff’s office and the county’s embrace of medical cannabis. 

Today stands in sharp contrast, as Hart’s deputies are dealing with one of the most lethal drugs America’s streets have seen in fentanyl, responsible for 133 deaths in Santa Cruz County last year — more than double 2022’s tally. In 2023, fentanyl was nearly twice as deadly as homicides, suicides and traffic accidents combined. 

Law enforcement has also been placed on the front lines of a growing mental health crisis. The county jail on Water Street in Santa Cruz has become the largest detox and mental health treatment facility in the county. Hart’s office has struggled with recruitment and retention of staff, and his corrections bureau was heavily criticized in a recent civil grand jury investigation for how it has handled mental health care in the jail. 

As sheriff, Hart has steered a workforce of more than 400 through constant challenges. However, 2020 posed the greatest test of his leadership, as the community faced the COVID-19 pandemic, scrutiny of and backlash against law enforcement following the murder of George Floyd, and the destructive CZU wildfire that charred huge swaths of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Perhaps most difficult for Hart and his office was the June 2020 death of 38-year-old Deputy Sgt. Damon Gutzwiller, who was shot and killed in the line of duty. 

That unrelenting year was top of mind when Hart sat down with Lookout for a one-on-one interview Thursday to reflect on his retirement. The outgoing sheriff discussed his ambitions for a new jail, the fentanyl and mental health crises, the process for choosing his successor years before the position is supposed to go back before voters and, yes, his legacy. 

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Lookout: The question of legacy is always determined by other people, but what do you hope your legacy will be? 

Hart: I hope it’s steady leadership; that I was present, I was engaged, and I was able to guide this office and our personnel, and also help the community, through a lot of crises. It wasn’t just a smooth road for 10 years. There were a lot of bumps, and it takes some leadership to help people through that.

Lookout: What do you feel has been your biggest challenge over the last 10 years?

Hart: Really trying to keep our agency staffed and then motivated. [During that stretch in 2020] it just seemed like we were taking hit after hit, so trying to keep people upbeat and motivated to come up and come out and do their job, it is tough, and it was particularly around Gutzwiller’s murder. Retention is a big issue. We go through great time and expense hiring somebody, and once we do that and identify somebody who’s going to fit in here, trying to then keep them is a challenge, as well as keeping staff who have been through a lot of crises coming back to work.

Lookout: What do you feel has been left undone? 

Hart: The jail is a real issue in terms of the clientele now. Having a maximum-security facility [like the one on Water Street in Santa Cruz] is really important in terms of security and safety for the more violent people, but the [vast majority] of our jail population is really people who are experiencing mental illness, addiction and poverty, and that’s what drives our calls for service on the street and that’s what drives our jail population.

My goal is to eventually shut that jail down after we create a more modern facility on the Rountree campus [just outside of Watsonville] that would house all corrections, from maximum security to minimum. There’s been a lot of conversation in city politics about how the jail negatively impacts the community in Santa Cruz. I want to end that conversation. 

Lookout: You just referred to that as “your goal,” but you’re stepping down in December – are we going to see movement on that this year? 

Hart: There’s been a lot of movement. We have a company doing a needs assessment right now. But, eventually, the voters and the county are going to have to take a really serious look at how we’re going to fund something like that, because the current jail is just not adequate. 

Note: Early estimates for the costs of a new South County maximum security jail have come in around  $200 million. 

Lookout: The jail has become the largest mental health treatment facility in the county. Is the corrections bureau equipped to continue handling that? 

Hart: We are prepared for that. Our people receive much more training now than I ever received as a young deputy, and we’ve never had this level of mental health professionals inside our jail facilities. But incarceration is tough on everybody, and when you look at our Rountree rehab and reentry facility, that’s a state-of-the-art jail, and how jail should be — big yard, plenty of light, things to do, classes all day. I would love to see us move toward that kind of model. 

Lookout: You’ve said that mental health care in the jail right now is adequate. The latest civil grand jury report was heavily critical of the jail conditions, particularly the improper use of psychiatric holds.  

Hart: That report was very biased reporting – we’ve sent in our responses, it will be published here soon, but there wasn’t a single item that we agreed with that they called out. We’re not usually defensive on these, but after reading that, it was an unbelievably slanted report.

We’re very limited on what our infrastructure here is in this county. We don’t have a trauma center, we don’t have a county hospital, we don’t have enough treatment beds, we don’t have enough mental health beds. It just goes on and on. The county and the cities are really going to have to invest in infrastructure moving forward, because, as we’ve seen crime rates plummet, mental health and addiction calls are just skyrocketing. 

Lookout: When you took over as sheriff in 2014, one of the big tensions with law enforcement was the county’s embrace of medical cannabis. That’s a different world from today, when now the community is dealing with fentanyl, arguably the most lethal drug America’s streets have seen. Has that changed the job for you at all? 

Hart: Heroin, coke and methamphetamine have always been very present in this community, but fentanyl makes these other drugs look like baby drugs. We’ve had so many deaths that we’ve had to add another death investigator to our coroner’s team. 

I’ve built a fentanyl crisis response team. Seven people are assigned to that team and it’s all they focus on. Overdoses are now being treated as homicides, and we’re having some success with the federal government prosecuting dealers. I would say my views have changed in terms of how we handle these cases. 

Lookout: Is fentanyl something that can be solved locally or will the county be dealing with it as long as the country is dealing with it? 

Hart: I think we’re always going to be dealing with it. With fentanyl, we’ve seen a surge, but I don’t think we’ve seen it top out yet. It’s still really on the upswing, even if our numbers fluctuate from year to year.

The medication that’s being used now to treat opiate addiction, there is just fantastic medication and I think the science is developing. We’re seeing a lot of overdoses where narcan is being used to bring people back; every deputy, every correctional officer, anybody in uniform carries it. We even have it inside housing units at the jail. I know that enforcement is just a small piece of it. I don’t think we’re going to beat this thing by enforcement. It’s really about intervention. It’s about education in our schools. We’ve got to stop this next wave, say, the 15-to-20-year-olds from that first use. It’s going to take a generation, I think, to pull out of this. 

Lookout: In the past, when Lookout has tried to get up-to-date fentanyl death numbers from the coroner’s office, we’re told you don’t have updated data. Shouldn’t the community know the breadth of the problem? 

Hart: The coroner does have those numbers. They probably haven’t done a cumulative, but we have the data. So if it was something you guys needed, I could call down there and we could get an analyst to do some work on it. 

Note: After our interview, the sheriff’s office sent over the 2024 statistics as of July: 38 deaths tied to fentanyl, 24 in the city of Santa Cruz, 11 in unincorporated areas of the county and three in Watsonville. That puts the rate of fentanyl deaths closer to 2022 levels, significantly down from last year.

Lookout: I know you disagree with the grand jury report, but one of the numbers that came out of that report was the high number of inmates who are being held awaiting trial, around 70%, and they can be in there for years. How has the system gotten to this point? 

Hart: We’ve been that way for a long time. Part of it also is that our court system is very slow here. We had one guy in there for nine years pre-trial. Right now, a homicide case can take three to five years to go to trial, sometimes a little bit longer. The courts have their issues, and the district attorney and the public defender and probation, but meanwhile, we’re having to take care of somebody who’s been locked inside a facility that was built for people to stay 30 days or less, and they’re staying there for years. It’s tough for someone to stay in a county jail for that long because that’s not how county jails were built.

Lookout: Are there any health concerns related to your decision to step down? 

Hart: No scandal, no health issues, but after this past election in 2022, the state extended my term by two years [a state bill aligned all sheriff and district attorney elections throughout the state with the presidential cycle]. I knew at that point that I wasn’t going to complete the term, and I was going to leave whether it was at the two-year mark or the four-year mark, and right now is a really good time to leave. 

Lookout: In the press release, you said that, before the legislature changed the election cycle, you had planned to complete the full four-year term. Now, you are stepping down after two. What changed? 

Hart: [When the term got switched to six years,] at that point, whether I left at two or left at four, it really didn’t matter, it’s still leaving mid-term, there’s still going to be the same concerns brought up by some people. 

Lookout: When you announced your retirement last week, you said you were endorsing Undersheriff Chris Clark to take over, who, if appointed by the board of supervisors, would serve as interim sheriff until 2028. In 2014, Sheriff Phil Wowak retired after a full term, but abruptly announced his retirement and endorsed you just days before that year’s election filing deadline, which led some to speculate about a fix. Wowak, in turn, got the job in 2009 after Sheriff Steve Robbins abruptly retired mid-term and endorsed Wowak to take over as interim sheriff, giving him the advantage of incumbency by the time the 2010 election rolled around. Robbins got the job in a similar way in 2004, after Sheriff Mark Tracy retired mid-term and endorsed Robbins as his interim replacement. This comes off as a sort of gaming the system in what is supposed to be an open, democratic selection of the sheriff. Why is this the way things have been done? 

Hart: I do think that, just like for any corporation, succession planning is super important, yeah, and so when you have somebody like Chris Clark who can come in, who fully understands the mission and the goals and the office — what better person out there to run the office? Look at our track record of stability versus some other counties in the area, we have a very stable office and an office with a good reputation. If you look at the last 30 years, whatever’s occurring here is working. 

Lookout: I think people are concerned about the democratic process that seems to be getting worked around. It seems like the sheriff gets to pick his successor rather than it being up to the community. 

Hart: I’m not selecting anybody. I’m advocating for Chris, but the board of supervisors will make the selection for interim sheriff, so they’ll have a process in place. And when I look around at our city chiefs, I don’t think any of them are interested in the job. There might be some retired police or something living in the county and I don’t know about it. But I look around our county, and I don’t see anybody with the credentials or experience that Chris has, so, but if somebody wants to step up and run in 2028, then go for it. Great.

Lookout: People have said this is an odd time to shake up leadership with so many balls in the air. The question of the new jail is looming, you just formed the fentanyl crisis response team, the new DNA lab is nearing completion, the existing jail is in bad shape, and hiring and retention has been difficult. Why leave now? 

Hart: There’s never going to be a good time in terms of any of these issues. There’s always going to be things that are coming up. But one of the things I think that the community can feel good about is that Chris is very much aligned with the direction that the office is going right now. He’s going to support the fentanyl team. He’s in on all the meetings we’ve had around the jail, and he’s committed to keeping that process going. 

Lookout: If you’re getting the job today, what is your top priority?

Hart: If I was the new sheriff coming in, my biggest concern would be the fentanyl crisis that we’re experiencing, and how do we keep this office staffed and moving forward. 

Lookout: What will retirement look like for you? 

Hart: The cellphone has been a blessing and a curse. I can be anywhere in the world, and somebody can get ahold of me and tell me something awful that’s occurring right at the moment. So I’m going to turn that thing off for a while and just try to try to unwind and relax and then come up with a plan after that. 

Lookout: Any foray into politics in your future? 

Hart: I don’t think so. I think I would have been a good representative for the Fifth District on the [county] board of supervisors, but, you start getting into your 60s and you start thinking about, wait, how many more good years do I have left? There are other things I want to do. 

Lookout: What’s one of those things?

Hart: My wife and I and son love going to this little fishing village in Mexico, just off the Sea of Cortez, so we’ll spend a lot of time down there. It’s great fishing and biking and just a fantastic place. But all my family, with the exception of one daughter, lives here, so I’ll be able to be more present and engaged with them.

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