Failed to List 2 Loans, Director Says

City Director Loretta Thompson-Glickman said Tuesday that she inadvertently failed to report two personal loans, totaling $6,800 and received in 1981 and 1982, as required by state law.

Public officials are required to report personal loans of more than $250 to the state Fair Political Practices Commission if the loans are received from people living or doing business in the jurisdiction represented by the official.

A commission spokeswoman said Tuesday that Glickman’s failure to disclose the loans appeared to have been unintentional and that because Glickman had caught the mistake herself there was no apparent wrongdoing.

Glickman said that she failed to report a $4,300 personal loan from Altadena attorney Pierce O’Donnell, who publishes the Pasadena Weekly newspaper, and $2,500 that represented salary commissions advanced by Morris Fisher, a Pasadena resident who is a former member of the Board of City Directors and the principal of a firm for which Glickman once worked.

Glickman said she failed to note the loans because she was not aware of state laws requiring such disclosures. “I’m not sure I read the fine print on the (disclosure statement’s) explanation sheet, to tell you the truth,” said Glickman, who was elected to the board in 1977 and later became Pasadena’s first black mayor.

“It wasn’t campaign stuff,” she said, “so I didn’t list it.” She first listed the loans on her 1985 economic interest statements, filed earlier this month. Glickman said she was in a financial position to begin repaying the loans and “just to be on the safe side, I put it down.”

Lynn Montgomery, a spokeswoman for the Fair Political Practices Commission in Sacramento, said Tuesday that no special review of Glickman’s statement will be conducted “unless there’s some reason to believe that the reason for not reporting it was due to some kind of conflict of interest.” There appears to be no conflict in this case, Montgomery added.

Glickman said that neither loan has been repaid. The money from O’Donnell was loaned, she said, “to save my house from foreclosure” in 1982, when she was going through a divorce. She had briefly worked as a consultant for Fisher, a developer and minister in Pasadena, in 1981, she said, and was advanced $2,500 in salary commissions.

Both O’Donnell and Fisher are friends, Glickman said.