Vista Councilman to Quit; Plea Bargain in Felony Case

A bitter Ed Neal, saying he is fed up with the inertia of city government and past the point where a court trial could clear his name, will resign Thursday from the City Council as part of a plea bargain on charges that he falsified city travel vouchers.

Neal, 46, confirmed Tuesday that he had agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and quit the council in a last-minute deal with San Diego County prosecutors, averting a trial this week on a three-count felony indictment.

“It was time to get on with business,” said Neal, whose four-year council term was extended through November by a change in the city election schedule.

“I don’t think spending another six months on the Vista City Council would have accomplished that much, in comparison with what it would have cost going through a trial,” he said in a telephone interview. “And even if I had been found innocent, nobody would have remembered it anyway.”

In August, the county grand jury charged Neal with misappropriating public funds, submitting a false claim and grand theft for seeking reimbursement from the city for his girlfriend’s airplane ticket on a trip to Washington in June.

After a public outcry, Neal repaid the city the full $1,136 cost of the trip, during which he attended a White House luncheon with President Reagan for new Republicans who used to be Democrats.

Neal continued to insist Tuesday that he merely made a mistake in billing the city $450 for a ticket for his friend, Judy Anderson.

“The plea bargain has nothing to do with my guilt or innocence,” he said. “That’s simply what we had to do to get it over with.”

Neal said his error was in submitting an expense voucher without double-checking it.

“I wasn’t exactly planning on defrauding the city and moving to the Bahamas with all that windfall of money I was going to get,” he said. “It was just a case of something that was overlooked.”

County prosecutors agreed to the plea bargain in part because there was no evidence that Neal had engaged in a pattern of abusing the public treasury, according to Linda Miller, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. The agreement was reached Monday in a meeting with Neal; his attorney, Richard Muir; Deputy Dist. Atty. Allan Preckel, and San Diego County Superior Court Judge Richard Huffman.

Huffman is scheduled to formally sentence Neal Thursday afternoon.

Dist. Atty. Edwin Miller and his assistants have sought to scuttle rumors that other elected officials--including former Mayor Roger Hedgecock and San Diego City Councilman Uvaldo Martinez--could have avoided indictment or criminal trials by agreeing to resign from office.

Such deals remain off limits, Linda Miller said Tuesday. But Neal’s case is different from the others, she said, because his resignation is part of a broader deal that includes a guilty plea to a criminal offense.

“We won’t drop a criminal investigation or criminal charges in exchange for a resignation,” she said. “But the office does negotiate resignations as part of an agreement.”

Neal would have been ousted from office automatically if he had been convicted of any of the felony charges in the indictment.

Other terms of Neal’s plea bargain require him to pay a $1,000 fine, submit to three years of unsupervised probation and complete 200 hours of community service. He will be barred from seeking public office during the probation.

In any event, Neal, a contractor elected to the Vista council in 1982, did not sound Tuesday like a man who would be interested in running for office any time soon.

“Sometimes I wish I’d have committed murder instead of being on the City Council,” he said facetiously. “I could have gotten off with a much lighter sentence.”

According to Neal, Vista’s five-member council--locked in protracted debates over growth and other issues--has lost the confidence of voters and has been in a holding pattern for much of his term.

“Nothing’s getting done,” he said. “They don’t have the support of the community, and because of certain factions in the community, they never will. They’re useless. It’s an exercise in futility.”

Neal, who plans to remain in Vista unless business opportunities arise elsewhere, said the city lacks leadership.

“What they need is at least three people on that council, with the same attitude and the same gumption I had, to be able to stand up and tell them, ‘We’re not going to accept any excuses,’ ” he said. “That’s the only way this town is going to move forward. It’s not going to move forward with this vacillating council.”

Some other council members, however, said the months-long controversy over Neal’s actions had contributed heavily to the council’s difficulties and the loss of public trust.

“This caused a cloud over the whole council,” said Councilwoman Gloria McClellan, the first of Neal’s colleagues to call for his resignation.

Like McClellan, Councilman Lloyd von Haden said the episode made it harder to sell the city’s voters on Proposition K, the November ballot issue that created a redevelopment agency in Vista. The measure passed by a bare four-vote margin, and then only after a court battle.

“People felt they didn’t want to entrust the great powers of redevelopment to our City Council under those circumstances,” Von Haden said.

But Mayor Mike Flick, who typically has voted with Neal and Councilwoman Nancy Wade in support of new development, said he was confident that Vista voters were more farsighted than to link their decisions on redevelopment to their feelings about Neal.

Neal, too, insisted that his critics were off base to blame him for difficulties in persuading the public to support redevelopment. “That’s the biggest cop-out they could use,” he said.

The council has 30 days from the time of Neal’s resignation to name a replacement. If it fails to act--or if the remaining council members, who often split 2-2 on major issues, are unable to agree on one--the seat will remain empty until the Nov. 4 election, according to City Clerk Jean Brooks.

Of the remaining council members, only McClellan said she prefers that the seat go unfilled.

Wade and Von Haden said they favor filling the vacancy with someone who will pledge not to run for the office in November. Flick said he, too, wants Neal replaced but would not insist on an ironclad promise that the appointee be a caretaker.

The mayor said the council will discuss the matter Tuesday.