Supervisors Spend $4,000 to Win Ticket Exemption

How much is fairness worth?

When it comes to disclosing the free tickets they receive to San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, San Diego County supervisors believe fairness is worth slightly more than $4,000--the amount it cost in taxpayer money for legal research and travel to argue that the supervisors should enjoy the same break on reporting free ducats to Padres, Chargers and Aztecs games as their counterparts on the San Diego City Council.

On Tuesday, the investment paid off when the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission unanimously approved a custom-made loophole in government regulations that would exempt county supervisors from listing the thousands of dollars in free tickets on their public disclosure

forms--just like City Council members.

“How do you sit back and say, ‘It’s OK that the city gets to do something but not the county?’ ” Supervisor Brian Bilbray asked in justifying the expenditure of county funds in pursuit of the exemption. “If the city of San Diego council members are able to do something, then how about the county?

“This was one added little double-standard irritant that was worth at least raising the issue,” he said. “At least we’ve got a ruling now, so if anybody asks why we don’t declare the stadium tickets, we can say we’re told not to.”

Both council members and county supervisors receive free passes to a special government box at the stadium for all events.

Each annual pass--worth more than $2,600, according to the latest public reports--and the accompanying free stadium parking are considered one of the most coveted perquisites of holding local public office.

The passes are given to the officials because both the county and city were responsible for creating the Stadium Authority, which built the Mission Valley landmark.

Since 1979, however, council members have been pardoned from reporting the passes as gifts because of a technicality in the stadium lease. With the city acting as landlord, the Padres, Chargers, Aztecs and other tenants lease the field, locker room and seats at Jack Murphy, with the exception of one location: the box reserved for government officials.

Therefore, when city officials use their passes, even during sporting events, they are technically only landlords gaining access to their own property and the access cannot be considered a gift, the FPPC has ruled. That distinction has excused council members from the necessity of reporting the passes on their public disclosure forms.

Not so, however, for the supervisors. Since the county was not considered the stadium landlord, each pass for the supervisors and their guests was deemed a gift and had to be listed on their annual statements of economic interest.

To Bilbray and his supervisorial colleagues, the unequal treatment “rubbed salt into the wounds” from the feeling that “the city gets everything and the county gets the shaft.”

Hoping to right this perceived wrong, County Counsel Lloyd M. Harmon Jr. spent 30 hours for research and made three trips to Sacramento to ask FPPC commissioners to change the disclosure rule to give his bosses a special break on ticket disclosures. At about $85 an hour and $415 in air fare and hotel expenses, his efforts cost taxpayers about $4,050.

The payoff was Tuesday’s FPPC vote, and Bilbray said it was money well spent, even though he and other county officials say the county is nearly bankrupt. He said fairness is important to the supervisors, who are paid $68,690 a year. City Council members are paid $45,000.

“The county ought to be spending money on equity for the county of San Diego wherever” it can, said Bilbray, who added that the last time he went to the stadium was to watch a drag race in the mud. “Every time one of these things gets by, it is a precedent that the county is perceived as less of an agency than another agency.”