Douglas County Sheriff Glenn R. “Rick” Trapp made a surprise announcement Thursday that he wouldn’t seek re-election this fall — a decision he attributed mostly to personal reasons.

Trapp, 56, a soft-spoken former prosecutor, FBI agent and first-term sheriff, said he was ready for a change after nearly 40 years in law enforcement.

“I believe that now it is best to move on to something else,” he said. “What that is, I do not know.”

Undersheriff Ken McGovern, a Lawrence resident who holds the rank of major, is widely believed to be a likely candidate to succeed Trapp, but he was not yet ready to comment Thursday on whether he would run.

McGovern said Trapp’s decision “just caught everybody kind of off-guard.”

In his four years in office, Trapp has overseen an effort to boost pay for deputies, a sharp increase in the number of warrants the department serves, and a steady rise in the average daily population of the county jail, from 111 in 2001 to 125 last year.

Trapp helped pull in a $400,000 federal grant for a high-tech computer system that will be used in patrol cars by both sheriff’s deputies and the Lawrence Police Department. The so-called “mobile data system,” which will allow officers to exchange information by computer instead of radio, is expected to be up and running in the next month.

Last year, Trapp received an award from Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center for establishing better mental-health counseling for inmates.

Trapp won election to the office in 2000 after the retirement of three-term Sheriff Loren Anderson.

6News video: Sheriff Trapp will not run for re-election Sheriff won’t seek second term (3-11-04) Douglas County Sheriff’s office

Trapp’s tenure hasn’t been without its difficulties. In April 2002, an inmate escaped from the jail because of what Trapp said was a failure by staff to follow proper procedures. A former jailer later complained that lax security there had been a problem for more than a year.

The escaped inmate, a Eudora man, was arrested about a month later in Oklahoma.

In October 2003, Trapp asked the Kansas Bureau of Investigation to conduct a criminal investigation after a deputy was suspected of stealing a set of autographed basketballs from an area home. The case has not yet been resolved.

Investigators still are trying to solve the November 2003 homicide of 40-year-old Carmin Ross, who was found slain in her home on East 1150 Road northwest of Lawrence. Trapp has declined to release any details of the case — including the suspected cause of death — saying he doesn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize the investigation.

“He has committed his career to law enforcement, so he takes things very seriously. He pays attention to detail,” said Dist. Atty. Christine Kenney, who once worked with Trapp as a prosecutor.

Trapp said a “long, hard” process, including discussions with his wife, led to his decision not to run.

“I knew that this decision was one that he was struggling with,” Kenney said. “I know there’s a lot of reasons why he wants to stay, so this was not a snap decision on his part.”

The announcement surprised Lawrence Police Chief Ron Olin.

“I’ve enjoyed working with him for the last four years,” he said. “I would have been happy to work with him another four.”

As second-in-command of the Sheriff’s Office, McGovern supervises most of the department’s lieutenants, answers to Trapp and serves as jail administrator. For the first year Trapp was in office, McGovern was a captain in charge of the department’s operations, including patrol, investigations and warrants.

Trapp later assigned McGovern to oversight of the jail, then promoted him to major in late 2002 when Undersheriff Bill Shepard retired.

McGovern joined the Sheriff’s Office in 1982 as a jail corrections officer.