ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Leavenworth Gets a Mulligan

Orange County Planning Commissioner C. Douglas Leavenworth has wriggled free of the district attorney’s conflict-of-interest investigation, a probe best described as some kind of joke. Leavenworth was allowed to simply amend a state-required disclosure form, which reduced the estimated value of gifts he received in 1987 from the Mision Viejo Co., a prominent Orange County development firm, to within a few dollars of state limits. That was all Assistant Dist. Atty. John D. Conley needed to find insufficient evidence to warrant criminal charges.

Now it will be up to the California Fair Political Practices Commission, which is conducting its own independent civil investigation, to determine whether Leavenworth broke the law and faces any fine. But the unmistakable conclusion from the way the district attorney’s office has handled this case is that there is no interest there in prosecuting this kind of conflict-of-interest case.

Leavenworth previously had said he accepted $365 worth of golf privileges, meals and theater and sports tickets from the Mission Viejo Co. and then voted 22 times in the same year and in 1988 on matters affecting the developer. But as Conley was so quick to point out, state law requires only that officials make an estimate in good faith of the value of their gifts.

So Leavenworth was considered at liberty to revise the estimate of the value of his gifts at $242.50, which just happened to be $7.50 under the allowable limit of $250. And the district attorney had no problem accepting Leavenworth’s explanation that his earlier assessment had overstated the worth of golf privileges and meals by “erring on the high side.”

There was, of course, no independent verification of the valuations of Leavenworth’s gifts. And there surely cannot be many golfers in Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi’s office assigned to this case. It doesn’t take many golf rounds--not to mention those additional meals, theater and sports tickets--to rack up $250 worth of carts and greens fees.

The district attorney fell back on the burden of proving, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Leavenworth intentionally violated the law. That’s hard to do when the very nature of the disclosure statement is based on a good-faith statement.

So now the district attorney can never be accused of ignoring the case. But the message is that his is one office where Orange County should not expect to find resolutions to the problem of county planners cozying up with big-time developers.