Lakewood Taxpayers Often Picked Up Tab for Council Spouses’ Travel

Did city taxpayers pick up the tab for Patricia Zeltner’s air fare last summer when she and her husband traveled to San Juan, Puerto Rico, for the U.S. Conference of Mayors?

City administrators say no.

But her husband, Assemblyman Paul E. Zeltner--at that time a Lakewood council member--says yes, even noting that a special discount reduced it to $138, less than one-fourth of the $554 that taxpayers spent on his.

All Patricia Zeltner remembers is that she had a good time.

“We went to museums, shopping, a lot of receptions and dinners,” she said recently. Over the 4 1/2 days, she attended “one or two” conference sessions, but otherwise stuck with the tour groups. “I’m not politically active,” she explained. “I do wifely things.”

City administrators shrug off the discrepancy, saying it doesn’t matter if Patricia Zeltner’s air fare did come out of Lakewood coffers. Although a 1985 City Council policy prohibits “officers or employees” from traveling with spouses at taxpayer expense, the mayor and four council members have made themselves exempt.

“Our policy,” Assistant City Administrator Michael W. Stover confirmed, “is such that each council member decides whether or not each spousal travel is reimbursable.”

And so it is that Zeltner and several Lakewood council members have billed the city for the companionship of their spouses on trips to Anchorage, Seattle, Sacramento, Monterey and elsewhere--at least a dozen times over the past two complete fiscal years, according to city records.

They have stayed in quality hotels such as Washington’s Hay Adams and the Hyatt Regency in Monterey and dined at popular restaurants such as Philadelphia’s Old Original Bookbinders and the Ritz in Newport Beach. Most every time, according to records and interviews with city officials, taxpayers have been billed for room and board, and sometimes for air fare in the hundreds of dollars.

“Obviously, the spouse of a council member is not a city official,” former Councilman Dan Branstine charged in a recent interview. “I find it very questionable whether that’s really a legitimate use of public funds.”

Councilman Larry Van Nostran makes no apology for traveling with his wife, Jean Ann, at taxpayer expense. “We are a family-oriented community,” he said. “I put in 40 hours a week working on the council on top of my running two small (car dealership) businesses. A great deal of stress and family pressures are part of this job, and I can accept that. But to be away from the spouse can be an additional and needless hardship on a marriage, one that I would prefer not to endure.”

“Gary Hart’s recent downfall,” Van Nostran continued, is a case in point. “Would (the presidential candidate) have strolled arm in arm with an aspiring actress if his wife were with him?”

The extra charge for a double room at a hotel, Councilman Robert G. Wagner added, is usually “nothing or some nominally low amount”--too little to be “worth the personal effort” for him to figure out or for city staffers to verify.

Furthermore, what Lakewood does “is not an uncommon practice” in other cities, Wagner contends.

However, the city councils of Los Angeles and Long Beach don’t allow spouses to travel at public expense. And after criticism arose last year in the City of Commerce, officials there revised council policy to require that spouses pay their own air fare before stepping on the plane.

When council travel expenses in Norwalk reached $87,000 for the 1984-85 fiscal year, about 98 cents per resident, voters replaced one incumbent with a candidate who had campaigned for spending reforms. Councils in other southeast Los Angeles County cities spent significantly less on travel that year: for example, $15,655 in Cerritos, about 28 cents per resident, and $10,133 in Downey, about 12 cents per resident. Neither of those cities allows council members’ spouses to travel at taxpayer expense.

In Lakewood’s city budget, officials report that the council posted roughly $28,000 in travel and meeting expenses--about 37 cents per resident--in each of the past two fiscal years.

Yet determining exactly how much tax money has been spent on council trips--and whether the expenses are appropriate--is difficult, Branstine contends, because the city keeps its financial records in a way that discourages public scrutiny. Unlike neighboring Long Beach, where expense records are kept by a City Council secretary for easy public access, Lakewood spreads its receipts through a number of accounting files that would be hard for most people to track without city assistance.

“It’s not illegal,” cautioned Branstine, who served on the Lakewood council from 1976 to 1980 and now attends Indiana University law school. “But the motive certainly is to hide the ball.”

Lakewood officials defend their record-keeping system as being highly efficient. But some also acknowledge that staffers have been hesitant to cooperate with two recent attempts--including one by The Times--to detail those expenses because they feared that the data might be used to embarrass city leaders.

Indeed, council expenses were vigorously criticized last fall when Zeltner, a Republican, ran for the 54th District state Assembly seat against Compton Democrat Edward K. Waters. In campaign literature, Waters tried to brand the councilman as a free spender with a taste for “fancy hotels and restaurants.” Zeltner disputed the charge but acknowledged that his wife often traveled at taxpayer expense.

“When I went aboard the council (in 1977),” Zeltner explained recently, “I made an issue of that. Being retired from the Sheriff’s Department, I had a good retirement (income), but when double-digit inflation hit, I wasn’t in the best financial situation. I made it perfectly clear that if they wanted me to go out of town on any of these (conference) things, and it was going to be more than two or three days, my wife went with me at city expense or I didn’t go. It was that simple.

“There was some indication at that time that ‘Well, that might not be a good idea. What you want to do is buy a first-class ticket and trade it in.’ I said no, that’s subterfuge and what I do, I do up front,” Zeltner recalled. “If the folks find some objection to it, then that’s great; they can get someone else.”

Little Cooperation

Sandy Polka, a Waters campaign worker who sought to review Zeltner’s expense records, said she got little cooperation and virtually no guidance from Lakewood officials. “We had to pull out record after record, guessing what had anything to do with travel expenses,” Polka said. “Some of it did and some of it didn’t. Five people worked on this for weeks. They (city staffers) kept putting us off. . . . We still maintain to this day that they could have given us what we wanted.”

When the Times made a similar request for records while investigating political charges made by the Waters campaign, city staffers were “a little bit gun-shy,” Mayor Marc Titel said.

“Had a story like the one you were putting together come out during the middle of the campaign, whether it was intended or not, it would have been politically advantageous to Assemblyman Zeltner’s opponent,” Titel said.

Zeltner eventually defeated Waters and resigned from the council to assume state office. But even with the election decided, city officials complained about The Times seeking records and asking questions about various council expenses.

‘Research Paper’

“In my opinion,” Finance Director Nancy E. Hicks wrote in a memo to City Administrator Howard L. Chambers, “the Times personnel have confused the definition of a public record with that of a research paper. I and my staff have neither the time nor the inclination to do their research and write their story.”

Hicks concluded: “In my opinion, there is no place where the public trust is guarded more carefully, more judiciously or more lovingly than in the City of Lakewood.”

Councilman Wagner accused Times reporters of attempting to produce “a story predetermined to be critical” so that it would “undermine our position with Lakewood voters,” and discredit Zeltner. He also said The Times was trying to use the issue of travel expenses to gain “credibility” that he said was lost when the newspaper editorially endorsed Waters.

Branstine, who also ran for the Assembly seat but lost to Waters in the Democratic primary, said council members have long been sensitive to questions about their expenses.

“This is like hitting a raw nerve,” Branstine said. “What you have here is political accountability, which is what they’re trying to avoid. If you can’t get the information, you can’t tell whether there are any improprieties.”

Lakewood officials say they have complied with every request for records. After reviewing more than 200 expense receipts covering the 1984-85 and 1985-86 fiscal years, Times reporters found that many council costs were no different than those incurred by other cities.

Incomplete Information

But reporters also were given incomplete and conflicting information, such as the discrepancy over Patricia Zeltner’s air fare to San Juan. (Despite her husband’s recollection that he was reimbursed for her $138 ticket, obtained at a 75% discount through a promotion offered by Security Pacific National Bank, records indicate that taxpayers were charged only for his full $554 fare.)

In general, however, The Times found that council members spent at least $3,900 in the two years traveling to Sacramento--with Zeltner and Wagner taking their wives along twice--to perform what they described as “legislative advocacy,” even though the city annually retains a prominent lobbying firm led by former Assemblyman Joe Gonsalves. Last year, the city paid Gonsalves $21,614, state records show.

City Administrator Chambers said that while Gonsalves provides “day-to-day contact with our legislators,” the lobbyist “strongly” recommends that council members also travel to the Capitol for meetings with state officials.

Taxpayers are also charged for occasional “family dinners” at which council members, senior staffers, advisory commissioners and spouses gather. City spokesman Donald J. Waldie said the meals are a way of expressing “the city’s thanks” to parks commissioners, recreation commissioners and others who are “only paid $35 per meeting, much less than the value of their actual volunteer time.”

$52 per Plate

Waldie said the dinners “are not at restaurants which are the most expensive.” But records show that they are not necessarily low-priced either. In 1984, taxpayers were billed $2,741 for a “family dinner” at the Ritz Hotel in Newport Beach. Fifty-two people were served at about $52 a plate. A similar dinner in 1986 at the Marquis Hotel in Palm Springs, with about 50 people in attendance, cost $2,245.

Overall, Van Nostran went to at least 15 out-of-town conferences at taxpayer expense during the two-year period. Zeltner traveled at least 13 times, Wagner at least 11 times, Titel nine times and Vice Mayor Jacqueline Rynerson seven times, records indicate.

At meetings of the National League of Cites, the California League of Cities and the California Contract Cities Assn., to name a few, council members say they obtained information that made them more effective and saved the city money.

“Before it was fashionable to be against drug abuse,” Van Nostran said, “we single-handedly spoke out against the drug paraphernalia industry and lobbied our city friends at conferences and seminars on the issue.”

Council members were active in organizations that helped reform local telephone rates and develop federal cable television franchise legislation--Zeltner worked closely with a congressional subcommittee on that issue.

“Our legislative track record (and) strong relationships with other officials forged at meetings such as these,” Van Nostran said, “speak for themselves.”

‘Vacation Time’

However, former Councilman G.C. DeBaun, who served from 1977 to 1984 and attended many of the same conferences, said some of his council colleagues “were using those trips for vacation time,” spending more of their day soaking up sun than sitting in the conference hall.

At most conferences, Zeltner said, “there’s work and there’s fun. . . . And they pick pretty nice places to encourage people to come.”

Air fare costs for a council member’s spouse typically ranged from $74 on trips to Sacramento to $377 for Wagner’s wife, Michaelene, when she accompanied him to a Conference of Mayors meeting in Anchorage, records show.

On the Alaska trip, the Wagners charged taxpayers $1,886 in expenses. Zeltner included his wife’s air fare in the $1,619 he charged taxpayers for the seven-day trip. And Van Nostran went along at a cost of $2,576--city records don’t reflect whether his wife was present. After Chambers charged $2,310 in expenses and “group meal” costs of $1,258, the delegation’s total tab came to $9,651.

The mayors’ conference the following year in San Juan cost taxpayers a total of $8,635, records show. On that occasion, four of the five council members took along their spouses, but--with the exception of Zeltner--all said they paid the air fare out of their own pockets.

Although Councilwoman Rynerson bills the city for food and lodging when her husband, Bud, accompanies her on city trips, she was the only official to never charge for her spouse’s air fare over the two years reviewed by the Times.

‘Personal Criteria’

“I don’t want to intrude on anyone else’s point of view,” Rynerson said. “My responsibility as a council member is to deal with my account according to my own personal criteria. . . .”

City records also show that while other members of Lakewood’s delegation to San Juan caught direct or connecting flights to the conference, Wagner took a side trip. Three days before the conference began, he and his wife flew to Orlando, Fla., rented a car and, on the way to Miami, “briefly visited friends and relatives.” Then the couple flew from Miami to San Juan. Records show the city paid Wagner’s $175 rental car bill, but officials say he later returned $89 to cover what he considered to be personal travel.

Wagner said the side trip occurred because he was unable to book a flight from Los Angeles to Miami. He and his wife also didn’t leave San Juan until two days after the conference was over--again, he said, because “no seats were available on flights back to Los Angeles.”

“I think that if there were obvious, blatant abuses,” Mayor Titel said, “I think citizens of Lakewood would care and have a right to be concerned” about the council’s travel expenses.

‘Genuine Purpose’

Added Rynerson: “There are a lot of people (outside city government) who travel these days, and I think they are aware of travel expenses. I think the important thing to realize is that you go for a genuine purpose.”

Lakewood officials say their active role in state and national organizations has also brought recognition to several city staffers.

For example, at a convention in 1985 the International City Managers Assn. honored administrator Chambers for his work on Lakewood’s arts and cultural programs. Chambers accepted an award during a luncheon in Philadelphia’s ornate Bellevue Stratford Hotel.

To present the award as Lakewood’s mayor at the time, Van Nostran flew in with his wife for the awards luncheon. Although the convention was designed for city professionals--not public officials--the Van Nostrans stayed four days, attended some of the sessions and dined at the famous Bookbinders restaurant, records show. The cost to taxpayers for the Van Nostrans’ trip was $1,356.